Richardson, Henry Handel

Richardson, Henry Handel
orig. Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson

born Jan. 3, 1870, Melbourne, Austl.
died March 20, 1946, Fairlight, Sussex, Eng.

Australian-born English novelist.

In 1888 she left Australia to study music in Germany, and she spent the rest of her life abroad, settling in England in 1904 with her husband, J.G. Robertson. Maurice Guest (1908), her antiromantic first novel, concerns a music student's disastrous love affair. Her masterpiece, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, 3 vol. (1917–29), combining description of an Australian immigrant's life and work in the goldfields with a powerful character study, is considered the crowning achievement of modern Australian fiction to that time.

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▪ Australian novelist
pseudonym of  Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson , née  Richardson 
born Jan. 3, 1870, Melbourne
died March 20, 1946, Fairlight, Sussex, Eng.

      Australian novelist whose trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, combining description of an Australian immigrant's life and work in the goldfields with a powerful character study, is considered the crowning achievement of modern Australian fiction to that time.

      From 1883 to 1887 Richardson was a pupil at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne. In 1888 she left Australia to study music in Leipzig and spent the rest of her life abroad, making only one brief visit to Australia in 1912. In Leipzig she met J.G. Robertson, whom she married in Dublin in 1895 and who in 1904 was appointed the first professor of German literature at the University of London. She abandoned the idea of becoming a concert pianist and began writing.

      In Germany she began her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908), the story of a young English music student in Leipzig whose career and life are ruined by a tragic love affair. In 1904 she and her husband settled in England. Her second novel, The Getting of Wisdom (1910), is an account of her life at the boarding school in Melbourne. On completing it she began the trilogy that occupied the next 20 years of her life, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930; Australia Felix, 1917; The Way Home, 1925; Ultima Thule, 1929). The central character is based to a large extent on her father (who had emigrated from Dublin to Australia and who died in 1879), reconstructed with the help of his letters and diaries. The novel is a detailed and sympathetic account of his tragic life, in particular of his inability to adjust himself to his adopted country. Her last novel, The Young Cosima (1939), is a reconstruction of the love triangle of Richard Wagner, Cosima Liszt, and Hans von Bülow. She also wrote a number of short stories, published as The End of a Childhood and Other Stories (1934), and an unfinished autobiography, Myself When Young (1948).

Additional Reading
Leonie Kramer, Henry Handel Richardson and Some of Her Sources (1954); Dorothy Green, Ulysses Bound (1973, reissued as Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction, 1986); Karen McLeod, Henry Handel Richardson: A Critical Study (1985); Axel Clark, Henry Handel Richardson: Fiction in the Making (1990).

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Universalium. 2010.

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  • Richardson, Henry Handel — orig. Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (3 ene. 1870, Melbourne, Australia–20 mar. 1946, Fairlight, Sussex, Inglaterra). Novelista inglesa de origen australiano. En 1888, abandonó Australia para seguir estudios musicales en Alemania, y pasó el… …   Enciclopedia Universal

  • Henry Handel Richardson — en 1945, un año antes de su muerte. Henry Handel Richardson, seudónimo de Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, (East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3 de enero de 1870 Hastings, East Sussex, Inglaterra, 20 de marzo de 1946), fue una escritora… …   Wikipedia Español

  • Henry Handel Richardson — Henry Handel Richardson, the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, (3 January 1870 20 March 1946) was an Australian author. LifeBorn in East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia into a prosperous family which later fell on hard times,… …   Wikipedia

  • Henry Handel Richardson — Henry Handel Richardson, eigentlich Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, verheiratete Robertson (* 3. Januar 1870 in Melbourne; † 20. März 1946 in Fairlight, Sussex) war eine australische Schriftstellerin …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Richardson — Richardson, Owen Williams Richardson, Samuel Richardson, Tony * * * (as used in expressions) Richardson, Dorothy M(iller) Richardson, Henry Handel Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson Richardson, Henry Hobson Richardson, John …   Enciclopedia Universal

  • Richardson — /rich euhrd seuhn/, n. 1. Henry Handel (Henrietta Richardson Robertson), 1870 1946, Australian novelist. 2. Henry Hobson /hob seuhn/, 1838 86, U.S. architect. 3. Jack (Carter), born 1934, U.S. playwright and novelist. 4. Sir Owen Williams, 1879… …   Universalium

  • henry — /hen ree/, n., pl. henries, henrys. Elect. the SI unit of inductance, formally defined to be the inductance of a closed circuit in which an electromotive force of one volt is produced when the electric current in the circuit varies uniformly at a …   Universalium

  • Henry — /hen ree/, n. 1. Joseph, 1797 1878, U.S. physicist. 2. O., pen name of William Sydney Porter. 3. Patrick, 1736 99, American patriot, orator, and statesman. 4. Cape, a cape in SE Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. 5. Fort. See …   Universalium

  • Henry — ► sustantivo masculino ELECTRICIDAD Denominación del henrio en la nomenclatura internacional. IRREG. plural henrys * * * henrio o henry (de J. Henry, físico inglés) m. Fís. Unidad de inductancia eléctrica en el Sistema Internacional. * * * …   Enciclopedia Universal

  • henry — ► sustantivo masculino ELECTRICIDAD Denominación del henrio en la nomenclatura internacional. IRREG. plural henrys * * * henrio o henry (de J. Henry, físico inglés) m. Fís. Unidad de inductancia eléctrica en el Sistema Internacional. * * * henry …   Enciclopedia Universal

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