Author Richardson Henry Handel
Henry Handel Richardson, the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, (3 January 1870 – 20 March 1946) was an Australian author. Born in East Melbourne, Australia, into a prosperous family that later fell on hard times, Ethel Florence (who preferred to answer to Et, Ettie or Etta) was the elder daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson (c. 1826–79), M. D., and his wife Mary (née Bailey). The family lived in various towns across Victoria during Richardson's childhood and youth. These included Chiltern, Queenscliff, Koroit and, most happily, Maldon, where Richardson's mother was postmistress. Richardson left Maldon to become a boarder at Presbyterian Ladies' College (PLC) in Melbourne in 1883 and attended from the ages of 13 to 17. This experience was the basis for The Getting of Wisdom, a coming-of-age novel admired by H. G. Wells. Richardson excelled in the arts and music during her time at PLC, and her mother took the family (her father having died in 1879) to Europe in 1888,
...in order to enable Richardson to continue her musical studies at the Leipzig Conservatorium. Richardson set her first novel, Maurice Guest, in Leipzig. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Richardson's famous trilogy about the slow decline, owing to character flaws and an unnamed brain disease, of a successful Australian physician and businessman and the emotional/financial effect on his family. It was highly praised by Sinclair Lewis, among others, and was inspired by Richardson's own family experiences. Richardson also produced a single volume of short stories and an autobiography that greatly illuminates the settings of her novels, although her Australian Dictionary of Biography entry asserts that it is somewhat unreliable. Richardson married J. George Robertson, a Scottish student of German Literature in 1894. In 1903, the couple moved to London, where Robertson had been appointed to a chair in his field at the University of London. Richardson returned to Australia in 1912, in order to research family history for The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, but after her return to England, she remained there for the rest of her life. Richardson died of cancer on 20 March 1946 in Hastings, East Sussex, England. Her cremated remains were scattered with her husband's at sea. Lilian Richardson, Ethel's younger sister, married A. S. Neill after divorcing her first husband, and helped found and run Summerhill School. In 1975 she was honoured on a postage stamp bearing her portrait issued by Australia Post [1]. The Getting of Wisdom was filmed in 1977, directed by Bruce Beresford, from a screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe, starring Susannah Fowle as "Laura Rambotham" with supporting roles by Julia Blake, Terence Donovan and Kerry Armstrong. The screenplay adheres closely to the novel. Maurice Guest was adapted, very loosely, for the screen in Rhapsody (1954) starring Elizabeth Taylor, with the setting in Switzerland rather than Germany. It ended with "James Guest" happily married, rather than committing suicide.
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