Henry Handel Richardson

Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson was born on January 3, 1870, in Melbourne. Her father, an Irish physician who made and lost a fortune in the Victorian gold rushes, suffered progressive syphilitic dementia—a traumatic decline that she later immortalized in fiction. She studied piano at the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany before adopting the masculine pen name 'Henry Handel Richardson'.

Her 1910 boarding-school novel, The Getting of Wisdom, broke new ground in feminist realism. Her monumental masterpiece, the trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–1929), remains one of the supreme achievements in Australian letters, chronicling the tragedy of a brilliant, restless immigrant unsuited to the harsh Australian frontier.