The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson
Introduced by Germaine Greer'I have been reading your Getting of Wisdom with enormous admiration...Your little rag of a girl is a most adorable little beast.' H. G. Wells, letter to Henry Handel Richardson
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 on the pain and confusion of growing up, first appeared in 1910. A century later it has lost none of its bite. In her splendid introduction Germaine Greer describes this classic as 'Richardson's only great book precisely because the subject is, like the rest of us, ordinary, and therefore deeply important'.
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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 | 9781922079404 |
| ISBN 10 | 1922079405 |
| Title | The Getting of Wisdom |
| Author | Henry Handel Richardson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Text Publishing |
| Year published | 2012-08-22 |
| Number of pages | 262 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |