num_pages: 491
description: High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment 'Thou shalt love'. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment 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 Jonathan 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 warm-hearted 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.
language: English
title: For Love Alone
titlecomplete: For Love Alone
genres: Fiction, British Literature, Australia, Literature, Romance, Classics, Novels, Contemporary, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 199
places: Sydney, New South Wales, London, England
publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich