‘The Young Man Will Go Far’: Educational Mobility and Christina Stead’s Compositional Practice in the Early 1930s

Abstract

Education is a recurring concern in Stead's fiction, but nowhere is it more prominent as a theme than in her unpublished and largely ignored manuscript, 'The Young Man Will Go Far'. Coterminous with her early novels, its incomplete segments afford a frank critique of educational and social inequalities and, more importantly, key insights into her motivation and art. Arguably these show the centrality of ideas and political views to her compositions, her skill in dramatizing them, and suggest that ideas were often an unsuspected source of inspiration for her writing.