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Henry Handel Richardson

Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) was born in 1870 in Melbourne, Victoria. She was born in a prosperous family which later fell on hard times. Her family lived in various towns in Victoria during her childhood and youth and she attended Presbyterian Ladies College between the ages of 13 and 17. (This experience was the basis for her novel The Getting of Wisdom.) She excelled at music during her time at PLC and her mother took the family (her father having died in 1879) to Europe to enable Ethel to continue her musical studies at Leipzig.

Ethel married J G Robertson in 1894 and later moved to London in 1903 where her husband has been appointed to a chair of German at the University of London. She visited Australia again in 1912 for several months before returning to England where she lived for the rest of her life. Ethel Richardson died in 1946.

Table of contents
1 Bibliography
2 Biography
3 Film
4 External Links

Bibliography

Novels

Short Story Collections

Non-Fiction

Myself When Young 1948

Biography

Film

Adaptations The Getting of Wisdom was filmed in 1977, directed by Bruce Beresford, from a screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe, and featuring Julia Blake, Terence Donovan and Kerry Armstrong.

Content by Perry Middlemiss (perry@middlemiss.org) with permission

External Links

Online editions of works