For Love Alone

One woman’s obsession with love and fate leads her to unexpected truths about passion, sexuality, and power in mid-twentieth century London

Driven by a belief in love above all else, Teresa Hawkins leaves her life in Australia and moves to London in search of her destiny. After years of emotional distance within her family, and despite her naïveté of the vagaries of heartache, Teresa dedicates her life to the commandment “thou shalt love.” Affection-starved and painfully vulnerable, she immediately focuses her affections on Jonathan Crow, her egotistical and indifferent Latin tutor. But it’s only through another man, an entirely unexpected influence on her life, that Teresa will gain a full consciousness of her own sexuality and identity as a woman. For Love Alone is a powerful novel written in an indelible, relatable voice—a feat of literary narrative by one of the twentieth century’s finest writers.
“[Stead] is really marvelous.” —Saul Bellow “No wonder [Stead’s] work has reminded many of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce—any tag to signify that the reader is offered breadth of vision and honest depth of enjoyment, with neither sacrificed to the other. . . . What her books teach us is that wisdom is the novelist’s ultimate requirement.” —The New York Times Book Review “One of the most remarkable accounts of what it feels like to be a creative artist who is also a woman, a woman of intellect and passion, to whom both are equally necessary, growing from adolescence through to the threshold of full womanhood.” —Dorothy Green
Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.