Henry Handel Richardson

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Henry Handel Richardson, the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, (January 3, 1870-March 30, 1946) was an Australian author.

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[edit] Life

Lake View House at Chiltern, Victoria, her home from July 1876 for 1 1/2 years. Her early years at Chiltern featured in the novel The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. The house was accepted by the National Trust of Australia in 1967.
Lake View House at Chiltern, Victoria, her home from July 1876 for 1 1/2 years. Her early years at Chiltern featured in the novel The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. The house was accepted by the National Trust of Australia in 1967.

Born in East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia into a prosperous family which later fell on hard times, she was the elder daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson (c. 1826–1879), M. D., and his wife Mary (nee Bailey). She lived in various towns in Victoria during her childhood and youth, and attended Presbyterian Ladies' College (PLC) in Melbourne in 1883 between the ages of 13 and 17. (This experience was the basis for The Getting of Wisdom, a coming of age novel)

She excelled at music during her time at PLC and her mother took the family (her father having died in 1879) to Europe in 1888 to enable Ethel to continue her musical studies at Leipzig Conservatorium.

Her first novel, Maurice Guest, was set in Leipzig.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, was her famous trilogy about the slow decline of a successful Australian physician and his family due to his character flaws and brain disease. It was highly praised by Sinclair Lewis, among others.

Richardson also wrote a single volume of short stories and an autobiography that greatly illuminates the settings of her novels, although her Australian Dictionary of Biography entry asserts that is is somewhat unreliable.

Ethel married J George Robertson in 1894 who was a Scottish student of German literature and moved to London in 1903, where her husband had been appointed to a chair of German at the University of London as a Professor of German Literature.

She returned to Australia in 1912 for several months to research family history for her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony before returning to England where she lived for the rest of her life.

Ethel Richardson died of cancer on March 30, 1946 in Hastings, East Sussex, England.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short Story Collections

  • Two Studies 1931
  • The End of a Childhood 1934
  • The Adventures of Cuffy Mahony 1979
  • The End of Childhood: The Complete Stories of Henry Handel Richardson 1992 edited by Carol Franklin

[edit] Non-Fiction

Myself When Young 1948

[edit] Biography

  • Henry Handel Richardson and some of Her Sources 1954 by Leonie Kramer
  • Henry Handel Richardson 1961 by Vincent Buckley
  • Myself When Laura 1966 by Leonie Kramer
  • Ulysses Bound 1973 (revised 1986) by Dorothy Green
  • Henry Handel Richardson 1985 by Karen McLeod
  • Henry Handel Richardson: Fiction in the Making 1990 by Axel Clark
  • Henry Handel Richardson: A Life 2005 by Michael Ackland
  • Entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

[edit] Film

Adaptations: The Getting of Wisdom was filmed in 1977, directed by Bruce Beresford, from a screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe, starring Susannah Fowle as "Laura Rambotham" with supporting roles by Julia Blake, Terence Donovan and Kerry Armstrong. The screenplay adheres closely to the novel, and Fowle's performance is a triumph.

Maurice Guest was adapted, very loosely, for the screen in Rhapsody (1954) starring Elizabeth Taylor, with the setting in Switzerland rather than Germany.

[edit] External links

[edit] Sources

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