Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children: Bookmarked

“Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead’s famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with “impossible” characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist’s vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading.”—Pamela Erens

Celebrated by writers including Jonathan Franzen, who said that “[t]his crazy, gorgeous family novel is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century,” The Man Who Loved Children is a 1940 novel by Australian writer Christina Stead. The harrowing portrait of a dysfunctional family, the novel focuses on the relationship between the father, Sam, a tyrannical crank far removed from the civilized man he thinks himself to be, his bitter wife, Henny, and their six children, particularly eldest daughter, Louie. Considering a contemporary classic, The Man Who Loved Children was named one of the the 100 greatest novels of all time by Time magazine.

In her entry in Ig’s acclaimed Bookmarked series, author Lucy Ferriss juxtaposes the egoism and brutality of Sam with the behavior of her own father, using his dairies to give the reader an intimate and devastating portrait of their father-daughter relationship. Ferriss also shares how The Man Who Loved Children influenced her own creativity and development as a writer, as well as taking on male critics of the novel—including Franzen—to get to the true feminist heart of what Time called “the greatest picture of the lousiest family of all time.”

Lucy Ferriss’s fiction collection, Foreign Climes, won the Brighthorse Books Award in 2021. Her most recent novel is A Sister to Honor (Penguin, 2015). Her 2012 book,The Lost Daughter , was a Book-of-the-Month pick, while her memoir, Unveiling the Prophet, was named Best Book of the Year by the Riverfront Times. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, December, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, and Novel Slices and have received recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Faulkner Society, the Fulbright Commission, and the International Society for Narrative, among others. Lucy received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and lives with her husband in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence Emerita at Trinity College.