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.