Henry Handel Richardson

(pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson). Born Jan. 3, 1870, in Melbourne; died Mar. 20, 1946, in Hastings, Sussex. Australian writer.

Richardson graduated from a college in Melbourne and studied music in Leipzig. She lived in Europe beginning in 1888, settling in England in 1895. In the novels Maurice Guest (1908) and The Young Cosima (1939), Richardson combined a realistic depiction of man’s inner world with a Nietzschean idealization of the “strong” personality. The trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930) is set against a broad background of Australian and English life of the second half of the 19th century. It depicts the tragedy of a man of strong moral principles who is inwardly isolated. The work occupies an important place in the history of the Australian novel. Richardson also wrote the autobiography Myself When Young (published 1948).