Henry Handel Richardson (1870–1946)

I am gobsmacked.

The novel begins as an entertaining tale of a headstrong young Australian girl going to meet the world at boarding school. It gradually evolves into a subtle, simple, and stunningly real observation of the pressures of conformity and the intolerance of naïveté, which, when paired with a strong desire to be accepted, can lead to many and often rending responses in an imaginative young person.

Yet it is not a tragedy. I am left moved, affectionate, a little worried about the show more future, and yet joyful at the intactness of the protagonist's resilient soul.

It is the rare sort of book that provokes deep self-reflection and a nudge in the direction of peace-making with self and life, and in this way brings to mind [[George Eliot]]'s [Middlemarch].

Bravo, Ms Richardson. show less

Absolutely wonderful read, 23 Nov. 2012
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This review is from: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
Wonderful book set in mid 1800s Ballarat, Australia. The eponymous character is - at the start - in his late 20s, an Irish doctor who has come out to seek his fortune, and has abandoned his profession to run a - not particularly successful - store.
Matrimony comes quite early on when he marries the much younger Mary. Her show more gentle encouragement prompts him to resume his medical career and gradually they move up in the world. Yet his life is never his own, with her friends and family coming to stay or needing help. And while loving, Mary fails to fully understand her husband:
'He had no talent for friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing, and say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered friendship...Sometimes he felt like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which no one invited him to partake because he had already given it to be understood that he would decline.'
In the ensuing volumes, we see him finding great success. But life goes horribly wrong and Mary has to step up and take the reins... I particularly liked the way that the final volume is written in part from the viewpoint of their young son, Cuffy, and how his feelings and behaviour are shaped by being moved from pillar to post and having a Papa of whom he is ashamed.
Absolutely wonderful read that deserves to be better known.
Wonderful characterization and descriptions of Australian life at this time for both the haves and have-nots. Although written in 1917, I found the style very much of the Victorian era in which the book is set. Deserves to be much more famous than it is. show less

This is one of the classics of Australian literature, a hectic, ironic description of a young girl's experience at a classy but morally and intellectually stultifying boarding school in Melbourne somewhere around 1900. She arrives there lively, spontaneous and imaginative; when she leaves four or five years later she's turned into a calculating, rather snobbish hypocrite. In the meantime she faces humiliation from classmates finding out about her family's relative poverty (her mother is a show more widow who works to support the children) and she goes through all the classic boarding school experiences: "crushes", jealousies, deceptions, religious and literary enthusiasms, bullying and being bullied, etc. But it all happens at a breathless pace, and we really get the feeling that poor Laura has no time to draw breath and grow up in peace.

It's a formidable attack on contemporary notions of what middle-class young women were supposed to grow up into, as well as on the low quality of the education available to them. And by the standards of the time, it's also pretty outspoken about things like the total lack of sex-education. No wonder that H.G. Wells admired it (although one suspects that H.G. Wells would have enjoyed any book that featured teenage girls in an atmosphere of hothouse sexuality...). Despite being very political, it's always light and often very funny in tone, and it even has something very like an optimistic ending. If you think about other campaigning novels about education set about the same time - Young Torless and The child Manuela were the two that sprang to my mind, for instance - that's quite something. show less

Warning: plot spoilers.

When your country has a tiny population, like Australia's, authors often have to symbolize more than one thing. Richardson, for instance, is Australia's Joyce (insofar as she wrote one of the great Australian young person comes of age novel). She is Australia's Eliot; not only did she, like George, give herself a 'man's' name; she also knew far more about 19th century intellectual life than most people of her circle would have known, and put that to good work in her show more novels. She is Australia's Melville, having written a quasi-symbolic novel about her young nation's growth and, more importantly, its flaws. And she's Australia's Mann, having written the country's great realist novel, and one of its great modernist novels. But Richardson managed to make them two parts of one massive book, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Sadly, Richardson's major novel is not as great as that by those men and women, but 'Richard Mahony' is, I'm fairly sure, unique in world literature. The first volume, 'Australia Felix,' starts out with an astonishing 'proem,' an almost grotesque visual sequence in which men are "ensorcelled--without witchcraft" by the "unholy hunger" for gold. But this is better read as the proem to the novel as a whole. 'Australia Felix' is a standard, enjoyable realist tale of a young migrant, who wins a wife, makes some money, and decides to return home. In volume two, 'The Way Home,' our hero fails in the old world, returns home, and becomes massively wealthy. In 'Ultima Thule', his wealth gone, he slowly goes insane.

If it were only this, the book would be fairly forgettable. But it is also to some degree a portrait of the nation's soul (though Richardson might have been uncomfortable with this reading): deeply ambivalent about its relationship to the old world, with fears of inferiority ('culture cringe'), ambitious but disgusted by ambition, greedy but egalitarian, and so on.

More importantly, Richardson begins the book in a fairly bland, realistic style, but as Mahony becomes more and more unstable, the strong third person narrator loses its grip. We get more stream of consciousness, more free indirect discourse, more ellipses and non sequiturs. Richardson uses modernist tools, but uses them to depict Mahony's madness, or the way he appears to his young son. Whenever we're back with Mahony's sane (and long suffering) wife, Mary, the narrator is strong.

But that madness at the end returns us to the grotesque proem at the mine's face: the nation, more or less founded (on this telling) on the receipts of the gold rush, can't escape the madness that was present at that foundation. This is the history that gave us modernism, and you can't help but feel nostalgic, at the end, for the cliches and clunkiness of the book's opening. But, as Mahony learns (twice!), you can't just go back home as if nothing has happened. show less