‘A Vermeer in the Hayloft’: Christina Stead, Unjust Neglect and Transnational Improprieties of Place and Kind

Abstract

Published in New York to muted praise in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was re-issued in 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston with a long and impassioned introduction by the poet and presiding lion of American literary criticism, Randall Jarrell. Jarrell’s argument about The Man Who Loved Children was anchored in a recognisable rhetorical move – the perspicacious identification of the unjust neglect of a palpable masterpiece, with the powerful argument this supported about issues of canonicity, literary judgement and mid-century American reading. Jarrell’s deployment of the topos of unjust neglect and his concomitant call to universal value was powerfully anticipated by another great American literary critic, Elizabeth Hardwick, ten years earlier (1955). Their arguments were enough to pull Stead into the light of the canon of comparative world literature by the mid 1960s, but not to secure her place there. After repeated recuperations on the grounds of being unjustly unread, Stead’s literary fame now seems to be founded in some part on the phenomenon of being repeatedly unread or proleptically unreadable. This essay addresses the structures and outcomes of this uncanny circulation of reading and non- reading and suggests that a priori questions of category and classification might offer another way of thinking through the activity of rediscovering again the work of Christina Stead.