Henry Handel Richardson

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

'The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel' - Peter Craven A superb, sprawling trilogy of a family fortune won and lost in gold-rush Australia. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Australia's most significant nineteenth-century work. It tells the story of Richard Mahony, loosely based on the author's own father, and his rise and tragic fall in Australia's gold rush. All three volumes - Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule - are included here. The trilogy stands as one of the great portraits of the Australian canon - and a vivid depiction of the migrant experience. 'A work of huge ambition, power, pity and unflinching honesty' - The Age 'The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is an all but lost continent of a book. It is a novel about poverty and worldly failure, and the grind and nightmare of a life that is ruled by money, which does its best to ride roughshod over every impulse towards simplicity and delicacy and truth. It is a book written in defiance of materialism and complacency, full of hatred of the vision of Australia summed up by James McAuley's words: "The people are kindly with nothing inside them."' - Sydney Morning Herald 'The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a masterpiece, a great novel. Reading it was one of the most fulfilling literary experiences I've ever had.' - Angela Meyer, LiteraryMinded 'One of the greatest novels in the English language.' - William Heinemann 'More than any other novel in our literature, more than Voss, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel...it is a mighty and moving work, this bursting at the seams anti-epic to the muse of a vanity which sees every golden bowl broken and every silver cord loosed.' - Peter Craven About the author 'Henry Handel Richardson' was the pen-name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, who was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1870. Her father was a medical graduate of Edinburgh University, and her mother was the daughter of a Leicester solicitor; they married after migrating to Australia during the Victorian goldrushes. After her father's death in 1879, her mother worked as a postmistress in country towns, but later she was able to take Ethel and her sister Lilian to Europe, to study music at Leipzig. Ethel, who became a skilled pianist, married John George Robertson, a science graduate turned philologist. Robertson was appointed Professor of German and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at London University in 1903, where he became one of the foremost scholars of his day. By this time Ethel had begun to write, having given up all thought of a musical career. Her first novel, Maurice Guest, was published in 1908 and had a number of imitators. Her second, The Getting of Wisdom, published in 1910 was described by H. G. Wells as the best school story he knew. Her most important work was The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, published in three volumes, comprising Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, from 1917 to 1929.

---

Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Actuel Editions
• Seitenzahl: 708
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Oktober 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 41mm
• Gewicht: 1186g
• ISBN-13: 9781922491145
• ISBN-10: 1922491144
• Artikelnr.: 60627067

Autorenporträt

Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, known by her literary name Henry Handel Richardson, was an Australian author. Ethel Florence (who liked to be known as Et, Ettie, or Etta) was the eldest daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson MD and his wife Mary (née Bailey). She was born in East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, into a rich family that later struggled financially. Throughout Richardson's childhood and youth, the family moved about Victoria. These included Chiltern, Queenscliff, Koroit, and Maldon, where Richardson's mother was a postmistress (her father died of syphilis when she was nine). The Richardsons' home in Chiltern, "Lake View," is now held by the National Trust and open to the public. Richardson left Maldon in 1883 to become a boarder at Presbyterian Ladies' College (PLC) in Melbourne, where she studied from the ages of 13 to 17. H. G. Wells appreciated the coming-of-age novel The Getting of Wisdom, which was inspired by this experience. At PLC, she began to hone her ability to blend fact and fiction convincingly, a technique she later employed to great effect in her novels. Richardson excelled in the arts and music while at PLC, and her mother relocated the family to Europe in 1888 so Richardson could pursue her musical studies at the Leipzig Conservatorium. Richardson based her debut novel, Maurice Guest, on Leipzig.