Henry Handel Richardson

The unfinished autobiography of one of the great Australian novelists—Henry Handel Richardson, the pen name of Ethel F. Lindesay Robertson. From the author of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney and The Getting of Wisdom, comes this lively and revealing self-portrait of the artist as a young woman. It has never been my way to say much about my private life....

"He had never got within measurable distance of what he called life, at all...deep down in him, he knew, was an enormous residue of vitality...It was like a buried treasure, jealously kept for the event of his one day catching up with life: not the bare scramble for a living that here went by that name, but Life with a...

One of the most memorable characters in Australian fiction, Laura Rambotham, aged twelve, enters the portals of an exclusive girls' school eager to be accepted. But this precocious country girl is snubbed and ridiculed by her fellow students, who are richer, more attractive and more adept at dealing with life's hypocrisies. The Getting of Wisdom, a wicked and satirical novel...

An autobiographical novel set in the musical culture of 1890s Leipzig, where Richardson was a student from 1889 to 1892. An international cast of music students perform, debate, love, and drink in an intense and self-possessed world in Leipzig. This forms the context to Maurice's consuming obsession for the elusive Louise Dufrayer, an Australian femme fatale. Maurice Guest immerses readers...

The Getting of Wisdom is the coming-of-age story of a spontaneous heroine who finds herself ensconced in the rigidity of a turn-of-the-century boarding school. The clever and highly imaginative Laura has difficulty fitting in with her wealthy classmates and begins to compromise her ideals in her search for popularity and acceptance.