Henry Handel Richardson

Henry Handel Richardson pseud. of Ethel Richardson Robertson, 1870-1946, Australian novelist, b. Melbourne. Her years of study at the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Melbourne, were reflected in her book The Getting of Wisdom (1910). After studying piano at Leipzig she turned to writing, living mainly in Germany until 1903 and then in England. Her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908), is the story of a music student's disastrous infatuation. The trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), which presents an accurate and outstanding picture of Australian life, is considered her major work. Her writing, clear and austere in style, has been characterized as combining romantic insights with scientific attention to detail.

Bibliography: See her autobiographical fragment, Myself When Young (1948); study by D. Green (1973).

Richardson, Henry Handel, the pen-name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946), novelist, born in Melbourne, Australia; she studied music in Leipzig from 1888, and from 1904 she lived in England. Her novels include Maurice Guest (1908) a tale of grande passion set in Leipzig; The Getting of Wisdom (1910), describing her Australian schooldays in the person of Laura Rambotham, an intelligent child caught between ambition and reality; The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, a trilogy (Australia Felix, 1917; The Way Home 1925; and Ultima Thule, 1929), of which the last is rooted in the biography of her own parents. In its epic sweep it is at once the history of a man, a marriage, and a continent, capturing the landscapes, developing social attitudes, and growing prosperity and respectability of Australia. Her last novel, The Young Cosima (1939), is based on a life of Cosima Wagner.