The directory «Plots»
Richardson Henry Handel
(1870—1946)
Henry Handel Richardson, the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, born in 1870 in East Melbourne, Victoria, was an Australian author. Born into a prosperous family which later fell on hard times, the elder daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson (c. 1826–1879), M. D., and his wife Mary. She lived in various towns in Victoria during her childhood and youth, and attended Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne in 1883 between the ages of 13 and 17. (This experience was the basis for The Getting of Wisdom, arguably one of the finest coming of age novels in the English language.)
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. Leipzig would provide the setting for her first novel Maurice Guest, a novel of youthful angst, obsession and suicide which has a mixed reputation--some critics regard it as a masterpiece of psychological realism, others see it as a mere imitation of the French and Russian realists of the 19th century.
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, her trilogy about the slow decline of a successful Australian physician and his family due to his character flaws and brain disease, is the only one of Richardson's works to obtain wide readership throughout the English speaking world. It was highly praised by Sinclair Lewis, among others, but its plot is too rambling for it to be regarded as an altogether successful experiment. Yet all three volumes contain powerful scenes, and the final volume, Ultima Thule, can be read by itself as a gripping example of a somewhat dated biological and social determinism.
Richardson also wrote a single volume of short stories, at least two of which are of lasting value, and a charming autobiography that greatly illuminates the settings of her novels. 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 on 20 March 1946 at Hastings in England.
Australia, 1975, Henry Handel Richardson
