The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
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.
PETER CRAVEN is one of Australia’s best-known literary critics. He was a founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies.
ALSO BY HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON
Fiction
Maurice Guest
The Getting of Wisdom
The Young Cosima
Two Studies
The End of a Childhood
The Adventures of Cuffy Mahony
Non-fiction
Myself When Young
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First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1930
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012
This edition of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony reproduces the text of the 1930 Heinemann edition,
which gathered all three books in one volume.
Cover design by WH Chong.
Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller.
Typeset by Midland Typesetters.
Primary print ISBN: 9781921922282
Ebook ISBN: 9781921921889
Author: Richardson, Henry Handel, 1870-1946.
Title: The fortunes of Richard Mahony / by Henry Handel Richardson; introduction by Peter Craven.
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Text classics.
Subjects: Gold mines and mining—Australia—19th century—Fiction. Domestic fiction. Australia—19th century—Fiction.
Other Authors/Contributors: Craven, Peter.
Dewey Number: A823.2
Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
No Success Like Failure by Peter Craven
BOOK I:
Australia Felix
BOOK II:
The Way Home
BOOK III:
Ultima Thule
I
Only Australia could have coughed up The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. A doctor on the goldfields meets a girl and makes good. He thrives, he fails, he goes off his head. He brings all his bright hopes crashing down around him because he has no capacity for practical life. Call that a national epic. No wonder we settled for the doggerel and the bushrangers.
Patrick White read The Fortunes of Richard Mahony as a young man, working as a jackaroo, and thought it was wonderful. He was not wrong. You could argue that the impulse to create an Australian art of fiction filled with that sense of calamity that can rise to tragedy, an art exalted in its scope however rooted in the notations of naturalism, and open to the way Australia can impose itself on the geography of the imagination as a thing of doom, rather than good fortune, all harks back to Richard Mahony. White might have said, with some truth, that he had come out of that rubbishy Ballarat goldfield too.
For some people the naturalism has always been the trouble with Richard Mahony. Germaine Greer wrote that Henry Handel Richardson chose to embrace the conventions of naturalism at precisely the moment when those conventions died. It’s a resounding judgement, though not one that can be sustained. Richard Mahony is a great, if belated, novel: Australia Felix was published in 1917, The Way Home in 1925 and Ultima Thule in 1929, seven years after Joyce’s Ulysses and the death of Proust.
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