It is, of course, an old story that Australian achievement can be old-fashioned, that it can be illuminated by supernovas which are—definitionally—no longer there. Dates tell us something. Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson (who needed a male moniker as surely as George Eliot did) was born in Melbourne in 1870. That’s a year before Proust, five years before Thomas Mann, three years after John Galsworthy and eight after Edith Wharton. And it’s three years before Ford Madox Ford was born.

Well, she could never have got the formal perfection of The Good Soldier or the supple mediations between realism and interior monologue that make Tietjens in the trenches seem like such a luminous middle way between Joyce and Evelyn Waugh. She does not, like Thomas Mann, master an old method and go on to animate a new: Richard Mahony has none of the modernist concentration, the claustrophobic and colossal formal intensity of The Magic Mountain, but in its limited and lopsided way it has something of the same steadiness of gaze of Buddenbrooks even if the familial focus is narrower to the point of seeming microscopic. There is too something of the same sense of a stretch of time (the period from the gold rushes to, by way of irony, the boom of Marvellous Melbourne) being intimately and absolutely known. Henry Handel Richardson did not, like Galsworthy with his Forsytes, win the Nobel Prize (though she deserved to) but she has the sense of drama and the piercing poignancy that Edith Wharton gets in a nineteenth-century novel, after the letter, like The House of Mirth.

Terence Davies filmed The House of Mirth and Gillian Anderson was staggering in it. And before that Martin Scorsese came as close as he ever could to Visconti with his film of The Age of Innocence. The difficulty with The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is that it has never become a shared myth by being filmed. Bruce Beresford, who filmed Richardson’s school story The Getting of Wisdom with such effortless authority, has written a screenplay of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony but no one, so far, will come within cooee of producing it.

It might be a different story if David Lean had filmed Richard Mahony as he was edging towards epic in the 1950s. Or Tony Richardson, who made Ned Kelly, and described Australia as a beautiful country full of horrible people. It’s his father-in-law Michael Redgrave who I see as Mahony: the silver voice, the refined face, the capacity to represent an imperviousness which is the other side of excruciation.

The voice of Mahony is an extraordinary thing in the way it wraps itself, delusively and magnetically, yes, mesmerically, round his wilfulness and his capacity to pluck suffering for himself and his loved ones as another man might pluck a flower.

Why had he ever left Melbourne? What evil spirit had entered into him and driven him forth? What was that in him, over which he had no power, which proved incapable of adhesion to any soil or fixed abode? For he might arm himself, each time anew, with another motive for plucking up his roots: it remained mere ratiocination, a sop flung to his reason, and in no wise got at the heart of the matter. Wherein lay the fault, the defect, that had made of him throughout his life a hunted man?...harried from place to place, from country to country. Other men set up a goal, achieved it, and remained content. He had always been in flight.—But from what? Who were his pursuers? From what shadow did he run?—And in these endless nights, when he lay and searched his heart as never before, he thought he read the answer to the riddle. Himself he was the hunter and the hunted: the merciless in pursuit and the panting prey.

Mahony’s predicament (which is never separate from his overweening blindness) is that his sense of his own superiority—which is real—is forever casting him down because he wears it like a fatality. Nowhere in Australian literature is there a more deadly and prophetic portrait of the national tendency (among intellectuals and other bright people) to see the singularity of the self as evidence of the fact—as a form of ontological entitlement rather than happenstance—that ego solus, yours truly, will always be the brightest person in any room. Whereas just this way of seeing things—which Mahony exhibits to the point of hubris—is the abiding face of national immaturity.

This may be why a certain kind of Australian sensibility (literally or spiritually expatriated) resiles from this towering vertiginous tragedy. Mahony is mired in his Australianness even though ‘Australia’ in its various more or less comfortable manifestations is the destiny he shuns, starting with Ballarat where he first finds success.

It’s not hard to see how the combination of factors that make up the obsessional power of Richardson’s masterpiece can come across with an all but crippling sense of embarrassment. That, I suspect, is the true source of the objection to the novel’s naturalism. In The Getting of Wisdom a limited part of Henry Handel Richardson’s experience is made to startle and soar through the guise of the school story. Societies which are worried about whether art is possible for them sometimes perpetrate literary achievement through the cover of writing for children. Everything from Huckleberry Finn to Kim to the novels of Sonya Harnett and The Getting of Wisdom does this.

In The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by contrast, the raw material of the author’s background is utilised with an aptitude that might appear gargantuan and unbalanced. Young Ethel’s father was a doctor, a man of exceptional talent, who rose high and fell mightily. He turned his face from the light of Australian colonial success, was financially ruined and at one point certified as insane.

It seems unpromising material for a three-volume nineteenth-century-style novel replete with section titles which resound with the grimmest kind of irony when we realise the horrors they disclose. And indeed the title itself is chief among those ironies because the pivot of the book is precisely ill luck or rather a kind of malign fortune, not quite identified with character as the demon agency of fate or reducible to simple misfortune.

Yes, you can call it a mismatch of treatment and theme if you must but the limitations of the novel—not least the way it constantly seems on the point of disclosing a world it then shies away from—are trivial compared to its grandeurs which wring the heart. Henry Handel Richardson simply persists in the folly of her own literary conception.