Henry Handel Richardson (1870–1946)

Laura is a country girl whose ambitious single mother saves up the money she makes from embroidery and sends Laura to a snobby private girls' school in Melbourne. Laura is something of a diamond in the rough - intellectually curious and vivacious, but wild and untamed. The wisdom she attains at school hinges mostly on gaining emotional intelligence, as she learns to navigate the hierarchies of schoolgirl life.

Henry Handel Richardson is, of course, the pen-name of Ethel Richardson, one of show more Australia's great canonical novelists. Based on her own experiences at Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC), The Getting of Wisdom was her second novel, and what a novel it is. Laura is not always likable, but she is always engaging, and her thirst for knowledge and acceptance are immediately relatable qualities. I particularly loved her discovery of Ibsen's A Doll's House, although there were other wonderful references - the amusing mistake she makes in thinking that Dante wrote Faust, or her fervently wishing the Oliver Cromwell never existed so she could get out of a particularly difficult history test.

It is particularly extraordinary to think that The Getting of Wisdom was published in 1910, before the two World Wars, before the flowering of modernism, indeed, before all the vastly traumatic history of the twentieth century, and yet it still rings with a freshness and insight that feels authentic more than a hundred years later. 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

This is a classic boarding school novel, but in contrast to the typical chronicle of boys’ hijinks, The Getting of Wisdom offers a feminine perspective. Laura Ramsbotham is from a modest Australian family, where her widowed mother earns a living as a seamstress. She has scrimped and saved to provide Laura with higher education, soLaura is shipped off to a girls’ boarding school when she’s about 11. Anyone who has been an 11-year-old girl knows how difficult it is to assimilate into show more established social groups, and Laura is no exception. The head of school and the teachers -- all women who should know better -- are of the “spare the rod and spoil the child” variety, and just expect everyone to get on with it, already. And of course Laura does, with some success but also pain and heartbreak.

The early chapters of this book are exceptionally well done, as you can’t help feeling sad for Laura and applauding even the tiniest positive happening. Laura eventually makes a couple friends, and then commits a huge blunder that is difficult for her to recover from. I felt the story lost some pacing after that and her last few years of school felt rushed. But the novel ends with an evocative metaphor that was, in fact, the perfect summing up of Laura’s school experience. show less