Henry Handel Richardson

The Getting of Wisdom (Dodo Press) Henry Handel Richardson

Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, later Mrs. Robertson (1870-1946) was an Australian author who also wrote under the pseudonym Henry Handel Richardson. She excelled in the arts and music during her time at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne 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 the Leipzig Conservatorium in which city she set her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908). 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 somewhat unreliable. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930) was her famous trilogy - consisting of Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929) - 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. Amongst her other works are: The Getting of Wisdom (1910), Two Studies (1931) and The End of a Childhood (1934).