For Love Alone (VMC)

Summary

High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment 'Thou shalt love'. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfillment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection on the first possible object, the egotistical Jonathon Crow, a poverty-stricken tutor who coaches her in Latin. Teresa preserves this love in the face of his indifference, contempt and ill-usage, imprisoned by her belief that 'to love is to give for ever without stint, and not to ask for the slightest thing'. It is only through another man - her ebullient and warmhearted employer James Quick - that Teresa comes to understand her power as a woman, and emerges from obsession to a real consciousness of sexuality and love. Set in Sydney and London, FOR LOVE ALONE, first published in 1945, is one of Christina Stead's finest novels. This powerful and penetrating exploration of a woman in love is now a major Australian film.