Background
Henry Handel Richardson was the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson.
Ethel Richardson was the daughter of an Irish doctor who emigrated in the 1850s, and his wife Mary (née Bailey).
Ethel loved the cinema, belonged to a private film-club which enabled her to see films proscribed in England and had contacts which supplied her with banned books. Her curiosity about the variety of human experience was one of her most marked characteristics and her knowledge of Freud's writings dated back to early days in Germany.
Richardson's life was tinged with lesbianism. At Presbyterian Ladies' College, she fell in love with an older schoolgirl; the feelings of adolescent females awakening to their sexuality were reflected in her second novel, The Getting of Wisdom. After her mother's death, she fell passionately in love with the Italian actress Eleonora Duse, but had to be content to love her from a distance. Her friend Olga Roncoroni, who had lived in the Robertson household for many years, filled the gap left by the death of her husband. After her own death, many of her private papers were destroyed, in accordance with her instructions.
Richardson died of cancer on 20 March 1946 in Hastings, East Sussex, England. Her cremated remains were scattered by her wish with her husband's at sea.
