Ulysses bound : Henry Handel Richardson and her fiction

Abstract

Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) is one of the most important novelists Australia has produced, though her achievements cannot be measured in terms of quantity. Maurice Guest, The Getting of Wisdom, the three books of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The Young Cosima, and some short stories make up her published fiction. She has been criticised as a mere chronicler of facts. On the contrary, as this book shows, she was an imaginative writer who, working within the European literary tradition, created an autonomous world. This is the first full-length study of Henry Handel Richardson since 1950, and the first to include a serious study of her short stories. The work is not a biography. It is an interpretative study of the fiction and its genesis in the life and temperament of the author. It is also an attempt to show how artistic virtue arose from psychological necessity. The book was undertaken to clear away some serious misconceptions which have been allowed in recent years to diminish Henry Handel Richardson{u2019}s reputation as an. artist. It sets out also to provide a firm factual base from which' to reassess her achievement. This is an important book for students of literature and for historians, but it will find a wider audience amongst admirers of the novels and observers of human nature.