Henry Handel Richardson

03 January 1870 - 20 March 1946

Standard Name: Richardson, Henry Handel

Birth Name: Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson

Nickname: Et

Nickname: Ettie

Married Name: Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson

Pseudonym: Henry Handel Richardson

In a publishing career that began in 1895 and first registered with the public in 1908, expatriate Australian HHR produced six novels (three of which make up an epic trilogy), a collection of short stories, and an enigmatic volume of memoirs. Her literary forebears were more continental European than either English or Australian, and her intellectualism and experimentalism produced a mixed reception, but her reputation as one of the important writers of the earlier twentieth century now seems secure.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships	Iris Murdoch	IM 's mother, Irene Alice (Richardson) Murdoch , was known as Rene, pronounced reeny. The Richardson family had produced two women writers, Frances Elizabeth (Richardson) Fisher , who was a published poet, and...
Friends, Associates	Christina Stead	Their friends—more Americans than French—included editor Samuel Putnam , remittance man Eric Townsend , and novelist Louis Guilloux . Paris was a haven of the literary, the convivial, and the anti-prudish. In London in the...
Intertextuality and Influence	Caroline Clive	Despite the universal opinion that the sequel was decidedly weaker than the original, it nevertheless did well enough to go into several editions. The Saturday Review noted that it was a book which, even if...
Literary responses	Ethel Mannin	Henry Handel Richardson , who was given a copy of Green Figs (perhaps by Mannin, perhaps by her sister , who had Mannin's daughter in her school) thought it the most dreadful piffle. Richardson was...
Literary responses	Christina Stead	The prize was worth $10,000. Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Secker and Warburg, 1995. 462 The Council minutes described CS as a person who had not lived in Australia for forty years and whose Australian citizenship was in doubt. Nor was her contribution to...
Residence	Christabel Pankhurst	Her audience included Henry Handel Richardson and her sister (later Lillian Neill ). In this first month of world war, Pankhurst urged women to set aside the suffrage struggle for the national good, and the...

Timeline

Autumn 1924

Educator A. S. Neill , who had been running a progressive school at Hellerau in Germany, then in Austria, opened a school of the same kind called Summerhill (from the name of the...

10 December 1973

Australian Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation said he had introduced a new continent into literature. He was unable for health reasons to travel to Stockholm, and his acceptance...

May 1978

Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.

Callil, Carmen. “The stories of our lives”. Guardian Unlimited, 26 Apr. 2008.

Texts

Richardson, Henry Handel. Australia Felix. Heinemann, 1917.

Richardson, Henry Handel. Australia Felix. Norton, 1917.

Richardson, Henry Handel. Maurice Guest. Heinemann, 1908.

Richardson, Henry Handel. Myself When Young. William Heinemann, 1948.

Richardson, Henry Handel. Myself When Young. Heinemann, 1964.

Robinson, J. G., and Henry Handel Richardson. “The Art of Henry Handel Richardson”. Myself When Young, Heinemann, 1964, pp. 153-10.

Richardson, Henry Handel. The End of a Childhood. W. Heinemann, 1934.

Richardson, Henry Handel. The Getting of Wisdom. W. Heinemann, 1910.

Richardson, Henry Handel. The Way Home. Heinemann; Penguin, 1925.

Richardson, Henry Handel. The Young Cosima. Heinemann, 1939.

Richardson, Henry Handel. Ultima Thule. Heinemann, 1929.

Richardson, Henry Handel. Ultima Thule. Norton, 1929.