(Ethel Florence Richardson was a prominent Australian writ...)
Ethel Florence Richardson was a prominent Australian writer who wrote under the pen name Henry Handel Richardson. Some of Richardsons most famous works include The Getting of Wisdom, Maurice Guest, and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Australia Felix, published in 1917, is the first novel in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. The book is based on some of the events in the lives of Richardson's parents.
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Henry Handel Richardson was born in East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, on the 3 of January in 1870, into a prosperous family that later fell on hard times. She was the eldest daughter of an English doctor who had migrated to Ballarat in the 1860's and died when she was still young.
During a generally unhappy childhood she attended the Presbyterian Ladies' College, and after her father's death she taught briefly as a governess.
At 17, she went abroad with her mother and sister; she studied music at Leipzig, meanwhile studying the masters of the European novel. Henry Handel Richardson began her literary career as a translator of Niels Lyhne by Danish novelist Jens Jacobsen; this was published as Siren Voices (1896).
Her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908), was autobiographical to the extent that the central character is an Australian girl studying music in Germany.
The novel, somber and naturalistic, was coolly received, being stigmatized variously as dull, verbose, morbid, and erotic.
Nevertheless, proceeds from it made it possible for Henry Handel Richardson to visit Australia briefly in 1912 "to test memories" and to gather material for the first volume of the Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy.
Marking a major expansion in Henry Handel Richardson's creative range, Australia Felix (1917) re-creates the mental climate as well as the sights and sounds of the goldfields life.
Irony supplies much of the tension.
The trilogy has been described as an unusually thorough analysis of the "geographic disorientation" that sensitive immigrants suffered. With the success of the Richard Mahony trilogy, the author's identity, previously concealed, was revealed.
Her earlier novels were reprinted and reassessed.
It was published in 1948 as Myself when Young.
She was an outstanding author. The Canberra suburb of Richardson was gazetted in 1975 and is named after Henry Handel Richardson. In the same year, she was honoured on a postage stamp bearing her portrait issued by Australia Post.
One of the houses at Abbotsleigh School for Girls in Wahroonga, Sydney is named after Richardson.
One of the residential halls at Monash University's Clayton Campus is named after Richardson.
(This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)
(Ethel Florence Richardson was a prominent Australian writ...)
Richardson experienced lesbian desire throughout her life. 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.
In 1894 in Munich Richardson married the Scot John George Robertson, whom she had met in Leipzig where he was studying German literature and who later briefly taught at the University of Strasburg, where his wife became ladies' tennis champion.
