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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.
    
        
            
            
            
Contents
            
            
                
1 Life
                
2 Bibliography                
                    
2.1 Novels
                    
2.2 Short Story Collections
                    
2.3 Non-Fiction
                
                
                
3 Biography
                
4 Film
                
5 External links
                
6 Notes
            
            
        
    
 
 Life
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, 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 of cancer on March 30, 1946 in Hastings, East Sussex, England.
 Bibliography
 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
 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
 Non-Fiction
Myself When Young 1948
 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
 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.