Henry Handel Richardson
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Henry Handel Richardson, the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, (3 January 1870 - 20 March 1946) was an Australian author.
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[edit] Life
Born in East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia into a prosperous family which later fell on hard times, Ethel Florence (who preferred to answer to Et, Ettie or Etta) was the elder daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson (c. 1826–1879), M. D., and his wife Mary (née Bailey).
The family lived in various towns across Victoria during Richardson's childhood and youth, including Chiltern, Queenscliff, Koroit and, most happily, Maldon, where her mother was postmistress. Richardson left Maldon to become a boarder at Presbyterian Ladies' College (PLC) in Melbourne in 1883, attending from the ages of 13 to 17. (This experience was the basis for The Getting of Wisdom, a coming of age novel admired by H. G. Wells.)
She excelled in the arts and music during her time at PLC and her mother took the family (her father having died in 1879) to Europe in 1888 to enable Richardson to continue her musical studies at the Leipzig Conservatorium. She set her first novel, Maurice Guest, in this city.
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony was Richardson's 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 it is somewhat unreliable.
Richardson married J. George Robertson, a Scottish student of German literature in 1894. They moved to London in 1903, where Robertson 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 weeks 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.
Richardson died of cancer on 20 March 1946 in Hastings, East Sussex, England. Her cremated remains were scattered with her husband's at sea.
[edit] Family
Lilian Richardson, Ethel's younger sister, married A. S. Neill after divorcing her first husband, and helped found and run Summerhill School.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Novels
- Maurice Guest (1908)
- The Getting of Wisdom (1910)
- Australia Felix (1917)
- The Way Home (1925)
- Ultima Thule (1929)
- The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930)
- Comprising the novels: Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule
- The Young Cosima (1939)
[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] Memoir
- 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 (Auchterlonie)
- 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
[edit] Film
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.
Maurice Guest was adapted, very loosely, for the screen in Rhapsody (1954) starring Elizabeth Taylor, with the setting in Switzerland rather than Germany. It ended with "James Guest" happily married, rather than committing suicide.
[edit] References
- Green, Dorothy "Richardson, Ethel Florence Lindesay (Henry Handel) (1870 - 1946)" in Australian Dictionary of Biography, online edition Accessed: 2007-09-20
[edit] External links
- Online editions of works at The University of Adelaide Library.
- Works by Henry Handel Richardson at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Henry Handel Richardson at Project Gutenberg Australia
- Henry Handel Richardson Society
- The Yellow Scarf catalogue information on a portrait of the author by Rupert Bunny
