Singular Schoolteacher

FOR LOVE ALONE--Christina Stead--Harcourt, Brace & Co. ($3).

"Men don't like an unbending woman," said her father, but Teresa was too proud ever to unbend. Trapped in the circumscribed respectability of suburban Sydney, she also shrank from the thought of becoming a spinster schoolma'am. At her cousin's wedding, when the other girls fought in a "concupiscent fever" to catch the bride's bouquet, Teresa drew back when she saw their "awful eagerness. . . ."

Thus Christina Stead, author of the widely acclaimed House of All Nations (TIME, June 13, 1938), describes with mordant skill the turmoil within her young heroine, the schoolteacher who seemed such a prude but who alone in her room paraded her nudity in obscenely contrived costumes and prayed to Venus for fulfillment. Less convincing is Author Stead's description of Teresa's attempt to find an answer to her prayers.

Pale, egotistical student Jonathan Crow, whose only response to her love was an endless and epicene discussion of sex, was her obsession. She followed him to London, found him unchanged: churlish, perverse, still unable to bring himself either to accept her love or to reject it.

Teresa got herself a job and waited. Only after eight more months did she finally come to realize what readers will have decided already. "How stupid he is," she said to herself. "How dull!"

Teresa finally finds fulfillment in the arms of her employer, one James Quick. Readers who follow the searchlight of Australian Author Stead's brilliant verbiage into every depth and cranny of her heroine's complex spirit will find themselves wondering if she has not overdone a good thing. In a tireless effort to prove Teresa's typicality, Miss Stead has made her a singularly atypical case.

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