Books: 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...