The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, a trilogy by Henry Handel Richardson   (1930)

I wrote this article in 2007 for “The Neglected Books Page”, a site that is still going strong 15 years later. This was long before I had a site of my own. I didn’t change one word for this reprint, and I still believe every word in it.

Here goes:

An Appreciation of “The Fortunes of Richard Mahony,” by Henry Handel Richardson

9 December 2007

“How I do hate the ordinary sleek biography. I’d have every wart and every pimple emphasized, every murky trait or petty meanness brought out. The great writers are great enough to bear it.” These are the words of Henry Handel Richardson, a woman writer from Australia who lived from 1870 to 1946. Yes, woman writer, for like George Eliot, she wrote under a male pseudonym.

Mrs. Richardson applied this principle of exact unrelenting truth she stated above to her own fiction. Her masterpiece, completed in 1929, is ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’, a trilogy of novels, which tells the story of a family living in the gold fields of frontier Australia, immigrated from Ireland, having to cope with the devastating effects of the young doctor father’s severe mental and physical deterioration from syphilis. I’ve read it is based quite closely on Mrs. Richardson’s own childhood.

I read this trilogy of novels about at the same time in my life as I was reading the great Russian novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The trilogy, being over 900 pages, is related to these Russian novels in size. But more importantly ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’, is similar to these Russian novels in its penetrating psychological realism Not often will you find a novel written almost eighty years ago that deals this honestly with no sugar coating or sentimentality with the severe mental illness of a young doctor head of a family. You can feel for the young mother and her children having to face the growing ostracism by her neighbors caused by her husband’s bizarre behavior. Of course, the doctor’s patients drop away after several of his episodes, and the family is reduced to poverty.

But not only is this family’s story courageous. Henry Handel Richardson is a writer of the very top rank. Although here in the United States she is little known beyond the movie of her novel ‘The Getting of Wisdom’ which was made by Bruce Beresford in 1978, in Australia Henry Handel Richardson is considered a classic novelist. Sentence for sentence, the writing holds your interest as only the best novels do. Here is a writer in English we can read without the filter of translation.

Later in my reading life, I discovered Patrick White, another writer from Australia, whom I consider probably the greatest novelist ever to write. I can’t help but think he must have read Henry Handel Richardson in his youth. If you like one of these writers, you will probably like the other.

Since ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’ is divided into three separate novels, I would recommend a reader start with the first volume, ‘Australia Felix’, and see if you are not hooked as I was into reading the other two volumes, ‘The Way Home’ and ‘Ultima Thule’.

I must say this was not a bad start.

‘The End of a Childhood’ by Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson)   (1934) – 76 pages

“How I do hate the ordinary sleek biography. I’d have every wart and every pimple emphasized, every murky trait or petty meanness brought out. The great writers are great enough to bear it.”

These are the words of Henry Handel Richardson, a woman writer from Australia who lived from 1870 to 1946. Yes, woman writer, for like George Eliot, she wrote under a male pseudonym.

Mrs. Richardson applied this principle of exact unrelenting truth she stated above to her own fiction. Her masterpiece, completed in 1929, is ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’, a trilogy of novels, which tells the story of a family living in the gold fields of frontier Australia, immigrated from Ireland, having to cope with the devastating effects of the young doctor father’s severe mental and physical deterioration from syphilis. You can feel for the young mother and her children having to face the growing ostracism by her neighbors caused by her husband’s bizarre behavior. Of course, the doctor’s patients drop away after several of his episodes, and the family is reduced to poverty. I’ve read It is based quite closely on Mrs. Richardson’s own childhood. This is one of the world’s greatest works of literature.

The stories in ‘The End of a Childhood’ are about this same mother Mary and her two children Cuffy and Lucie after the husband and father Richard Mahony has died. A reader unfamiliar with the work of Richardson can fully appreciate these related stories in ‘The End of a Childhood’ without knowing the background of the characters, but for those of us who have read ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’ trilogy these stories are extra special. The stories bring back characters we know and care about.

Mary Mahony speaks of her children thus:

“In other words, they both were very highly strung, and in consequence, the strain of his illness, and the unhappy years preceding it, had told on them more severely than if they had been ordinary children.”

No writer is better than Richardson at capturing the poignancy of those tragic and not-so-tragic incidents that occur during a normal lifetime. A neighbor lady caring for the children during their mother’s sickness, says the following to Cuffy:

“Well I know this, my boy, there’s precious little of your poor Ma in either of you. It’s your Pa you take after, both of you, more’s the pity. He was just such another. What she had to put up with, her life long, simply doesn’t bear telling.”

I can never get enough of the story from the ‘Fortunes of Richard Mahony’ trilogy. It is amazing how vividly I remember the plight of the Irish family of Richard Mahony out in the Australian bush in Ballarat.

Grade:    A