The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson

Introduced byPeter Craven
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 capital L.

Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush- elsewhere is always better. Searching for a place, a meaning, a life, and always loyally supported by his wife Mary, he journeys from shopkeeping to medicine, from poverty to wealth, from order to chaos. With its wisdom, intelligence and effortless narrative power, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a masterpiece.
www.textclassics.com.au

Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson was born into an affluent Melbourne family in 1870. Her father Walter was a doctor of medicine. When Richardson was nine he died of syphilis after being admitted to Melbourne's Kew mental asylum. His illness and suffering had a huge impact on his family.

After his death, Richardson's mother took her children to Maldon where she worked as the postmistress.

Richardson was sent to board at the Presbyterian Ladies College in 1883--an experience that provided material for her novel The Getting of Wisdom. At school she developed into a talented pianist and tennis player.

In 1888, she travelled to Europe with her mother and studied at the Leipzig Conservatorium where she met John George Robertson, a Scottish expert in German literature. The pair married and settled in London. She published her first novel, Maurice Guest, in 1908. She took the pen name of Henry Handel Richardson and used it for all of her books.

Richardson made her only journey back to Australia in 1912 to complete her research for the trilogy that would become The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Her final novel The Young Cosima appeared in 1939. Henry Handel Richardson died in Sussex in 1946.

Carmen Callil founded Virago Press in 1972 and later became managing director of Chatto & Windus and the Hogarth Press. Since 1995 she has worked as a writer and critic. She is the author of Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, and co-author, with Colm Toibin, of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781921922282
ISBN 10	1921922281
Title	The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
Author	Henry Handel Richardson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Text Publishing
Year published	2012-04-26
Number of pages	952
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.