What Is Life?

A LIFE MICHAEL ACKLAND ,CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS l'U BUSHED IlYTH£ PRESS Sl'N01GATE opn'lE UNIVI3,RS,In' Of' Ci\UIlR!DGE 111e Pitt Building, TrumpiJl&rn[] Street, Carnbtld1!l~. Utllil'eci KJItl]l:dlDIn O.MM1DGE llN1VE~R:siITYPRESS r~e Edirtburgh Buildiflg-, Dmbri~ CB,2 .2RU, VI{ 40 Wcsc 20th Street, NewYC),k, NY 10011-42H, USA 477 Wjmmu~1Dwn Road. POrt Mdlmume, VIC 32107, AiUsrr:l\lia R"h; de Ai«cc6Jl 13,2&0 14 M~drid, Spain Deck: H';>IJ~~, The W;rrerfn:m~, C~:pcTo'!'''r. ,SO!},!, S<:nnh ,Afric~ http:t{\'I\vw-cambtid1!l~.org This bml\\ is in copyright. Stlbj~,cl \0 s\:awuuy c:x.ceprio[] and to the prcwisiollS of rdt\'31\, "oneco"" HCl:ll~ililg:t{;roemcmi, f":) r<!praduccian of .my par, may m,ite pllKI; Wid,m'lt tts" "it iu~ rI petmissjo!l of 01 mbrldg~ Uniivcrsh:yr PtqS, Fits( published by C;u:nbridge Univ~rsity I'relS 2004 PriE1.ttd in Au~trn\ia by SPA ['Mnlt Group T;pt'fo,e Gtl.I'amond (AdDIoi) llfl3 Pt. SyJltml QLI~rIOO~re!s® {BCI A c(1tllitIgUC" 1ffl>rafor this book is itvni/n/i>!e /r()rr, tfu BritM Libmiry N(1tiomrl Li6nrry ofAumalia CrltI'Itog!lillg fJi 1'"blfc(l.ti~J,r Of/HI A.::khnd. Mich,.ei H~[ll:)f Bandcl Richardson: 'a lif<:. BibliGg",phy. Includes Index. ISBN \) 521 840554. 1. Rkharliro", Henry H«nde], 1B'70-1946. 2. Noyclis{•. A.mtalllln - 20th r;~l)rl1.ry - rut>gr~phy, 3, W ...mell iand I[reranw! - Au~- Hi.s.to[Y- 20th remmy. I. Title- ASZ3.:i. [ ~ --""~ JAMES CQOK ' I UNIViEHSITY LIBRARY  For Rhonda and for Pam and Tony How I.do ha.tt the {)1'dinary .r/e,ek biography! I'd have tvery wart &- pimple e:rnphdJised. ellery trkky trait or petty meannm brought {Jut. Tly,f! great writers art great enough to' bear it, Henry Handel Richardson  Contents Acknowledgemems XUI Chronology xv Ptlologue 1 1 Blood Lines 5 2 The Whirlpool of Destiny 26 3 Trauma and its Fictions 45 4 Whatever Happened at PLC? 59 5 Love and MUSIC in Lejpzig 80 6 'A Failure AU Round' 105 7 The Continent to the Rescue ]26 8 Reappraising England 1'54 9 A Denizen of Many Worlds 182 11) Winds of Change 21016 11 Blackout 232 12 Towards the Next Room 256 Notes 275 Bibliography 308 Index 320 IX  Illustrations Unless otherwise stated, photographs Vii: from the Monash University Richardson Project. Text Dr Walter Richardson. 8 Ettie, til an.d Mar Main in Leipzig, 1889 97 Rich.ardson th,e compulsive smoker 151 NL The Ri,c:har,dson sisters in Harrow, 19D5 164 NL Riclhardson with her nephew Walter Neusratter, 1905 172 NL Henry skiing with Walter near Dr,esden .• 1913 176 NL 90 Regem~s Park Road 186 NL 'Westfield', Lyme Regis, with me Cobb in the background 215 The main beach, Lyme Regis 217 Henry and Georgea[ Lyme Regis 220 NL Henry and Olga at Newquay, 1934 223 Richardson as cd,ebrm:d author 230 NL 'Green Ridges', Falrlighr 244 NL Xl XII lLWSTRAT10NS LiUian Neilt 247 NL Richardson's female circle 2'50 IDcharoson and her Armstrong-Siddeley 2.52 Plates Mary Ricnardson alld her 'chicks' hetween pages 92 and 93 Baie and Lil Richardson's 1886 matriculation class at PLC NL Ettie and George Robertson in Munich NL The concert hall of the Leipzig ConservatQriUl£n Leipzig OmsetrJtlt()rium ofMusic Suffragette poster betWeen pages 188 and 189 Mary Richardson in later life NL General Colleges Building. Kaiser Wilhelm University, Scrasbourg iluthoTScoUCc.rion George, Henry, Walter and Lit holidaying in me Doinmlres, 1910 NL Richardson in her London study, 19,30 Nt Olga Roncoroni Henry and Olga at Lyme Regis Ri,c;:hardson with one of her much-loved P'i::1rs Richardson's last passport photograph NL Maps Strasbourg 134 London 184 xii IILUJSTItATIQNS Lilllil1n Nem 247 NL Richardson's femah~; circle 250 Ridmdso!ll and her Armst[ong-Siddeley 252 Plates Mar}' Richardson and her 'chicks' between pages 92 and 93 Ettie and Lil Richardson's 1886 mauicu!tation dass at PLC NL Ettie and George Robertson in Mun.kh NL The concert hall of the Leipzig Conservatorium Leipldg CO;mel1/,awr'i/lm ofMusic Suffragette poster between pages 18S and 189 Mary Richardson in b.ter life NL GenelllaI Collegles BuiLding, Kaiis,er Wi'lhelm UniverSity, Stras00 lIrg AMhors ,coltec#on Geo.rge, Henry, Walter and Lit holidaying in the Dol,omites, 19110 NL Richardson in. h,er Lon.don study, 19.30 NL Olga Roncon-mi HenI~'and. Ol:ga at Lyme Regis Richardson with one of her much~Thoved pets Richardson's laSt passport phowg:raph NL Maps Strasbourg 134 Lonnon 184  Prologue HENRY HANDEL lUCHARDSON is now one of Australia's best known writers, but the woman behind the pseudonym, Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson, remains shrouded in conjecture. Initially her novels received a mixed press, sold spasmodically, and by the Second World War were out of print. Since her death her reputation has firmed, with films and reprints bringing her fiction before a wider public. Yet many crucial issues bearing on her private life are still unresolved. Was she, as some have suggested, drawn to lesbianism, or at the least to bisexuality? Did she fear to contract congenital syphilis? What did she think of her wayward, iconodastic father? What was her relationship with her radical, reformist sister Lil? What was her attitude to the woman's movement? The Munich accord? The questions are almost as endless as the later surmises. To this mystery she contributed in no small measure by her own decisions. By choosing to live pennanently overseas from 1889, she distanced herselffrom her native land and likely chroniclers, and her reclusive English existence assured that she left few traces in London social life. Even her final literary testament, MyselflYlhen Yr)U~g,. begins with the words: 'It has never been my way to say much about my private life. Rightly or wrongly, I believed this only concerned myself. l It breaks off, moreover, at the beginning of 1895, before she began prolonged creative wfiring or serious experimentations with the supernatural, and years before world events would force her to reappraise her feelings for the two countries which exercised the greatest influence on her; Australia and Germany. This dearth of reliable information was fully intended. During her lifetime Richardson received many requests for biographical details and did little to fulfil them. Instead she jealously guarded both the secret of her 2 HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON gender and details of her family life, while feeding biographers, as Elizabeth Summons observed, she thought was good for and she the world to believe of her'.1 This was done through occasional then concertedly through an aucobiography in which apparent frankness masks repeated manipulation of the facts. Readers, have been to reC()gmse Standard accollnts of life follow it closely, paraphrasing Richardson's words rarely questioning its accuracy. Certainly ll1yself When Young sheds valuable light 011 her existence and attitudes, bllt often its value is as a psychological docu- ment in which fantasies eclipse, or compulsions elide, verifiable actuality. , as Dorothy Green undersC()red, 'were always subject to control for purpose' too often her putative purpose has been leEr unexamined." Similarly, photographs of her few insights. Heavily lidded eyes lend her gaze a veiled quality, studied poses physical defects, as an unsightly birthmark, and she was capable of sending an enthusiastic correspondem a reproduction of Goethe's bust in profile with has always been said that the portrait ... has a certain likeness to .4 Yet veil can lifted, at least in part, and her auto- biography interrogated and probed for hidden revelations. Biography inevitably assumes a particular of vision, and this account of life is no exception. It is haunted two images. One is of the impressionable child in 'The Bathe', the tale which introduces her major work, Grow.ing Pa.im; Sf~etches o/Girlhood. This story focuses on a crisis of self-identity, a dawning, fearful realisation of the burden of gender which the female child is destined to assume. It opens with a na.k.ed prepubescent girl, frolicking in the shallows beyond the restricting shoreline. Observing from are two mature women. Enticed by her heedless pleasure as well as by the inviting natural scene, they to strip and join her. upon layer of clothes is cast off to reveal tired, misshapen bodies marked by trials of sexual maturity: Splay-legged they were, from the weight of these [physical] protuberances. Above their knees, garters had cut fierce red lines in the their bodies were criss-crossed with red furrows, from the variety of strings and bones that had lashed them in. The calves of one showed purple-knotted with veins; across the othel"s, abdomen ran a longirudinal scar. One was patched with red hair, one with black. 5 For the child it is a terrifying revelation. Before she no more seen a female body grasped what adulthood might mean for her.  PROLOGUE 3 Now she stares with 'horrid fascination' at 'something ugly' -socially and bi.ologically inscribed females. Her concluding thoughts are at once comprehensible and mockingly impossible:'Oh, never ... never .... no, not ever now did she want to grow up. She would always stop a little girl'. 6 The story is the climax of decades of engagement with women's experience, with suffragette ideology and with the dramas of heterosexuality which Richardson knew equally from literature and from life. The associadon of childhood with insecurity and rude awakenings had other roots. These stretched back to the author's own traumatic upbringing, when the sea was a source of refuge and joy, the land a site of harrowing insights into an adult world which, arrer promising nurturing protection, had shown a dark and shocking underside which the young girl never forgot. The orher seminal image is of the secluded work-space, the sound- proofed room of her own upon which she insisted. There, shielded from disturbanccs by closed doors and a well regulated household, Richardson sifted and reshaped the remembered past into the work for which she is justly famed. For the best pan of forty years her mornings were devoted to writing, her afternoons to recreation. This rigidly maintained romine, however, was singularly poor in raw life experience. For this she had to reach back into the rich store gleaned during eleven crucial years spent on the Continent, and even earlier to the mixed blessing of a youth spent in Australia. The importance of these two periods is duly reflected in this study, as it was in the subjects and seuings of her novels, and their literary appropriation provides a perfect illustration of Nietzsche's adage: 'In solitude grows what one brings into it, also the inner beast [ViehJ'.7 Richardson, who drew many of the epigraphs for The Getting ojWisdom from this same passage in Thus Spo/<e Zarathustra, undoubtedly knew Nietzsche's dictum. She would have recognised its personal application, and she went to considerable lengths in her fiction to conceal the varied and often dark sources of her inspiration. Her earlier self, Ettie or Ethel Richardson, was even eclipsed in daily usage by her later pseudonym Henry, and my subsequent use of these two names is intended not only to follow her family's practice, but also to underscore her distinctive avatars as Ettie and Henry Handel. To the outside world her authorial existence may have seemed con- ventional and withdrawn. But its results show her to have been a mature version of the intelligent, disenchanted woman in hel: tale 'The Professor's Experiment' which concludes: 'behind her locked door, Annemarie con- tinued to indulge thoughts and hatch plans of the kind that herald revolutions'.8 In Richardson's case, fictional probings were fuelled by a deep 4 HENRY 11ANDEL RICHARDSON sense of something gone 'wrong in making', in herself and in the nature of things. 9 This translated into sodal criticism and an extreme drive for privacy. Her writing.·name was at once a mask and a buffer. 'This Henry Handel is the man of straw I have set up for the critics to tilt at, while I sit & obscure behind.'lo In however, felt keenly the barbs criticisms launched at H.H.R., but her did distance her f;unily life and doings from scrutiny. urged to reveal details of her own she quipped: 'Time enough for more when I am dead & gone'. I) It was a reiterated as was the for more than 'the ordinary sleek biography': 'I decline to when the time does come. The whole truth for me' .12 years her death and a decade release her embargoed papers, it is time to reconsider her life, to progress further towards the tantalising but elusive goal of 'the whole truth'. Her correspondence is now published, her novels and other family have been carefully edited, her life-story partly told. Yet many of its most im.portant phases still remain largely unexplored assertion that 'the books are me, outside them there is lirde worth knowing' has been wo seldom chaHengcd. 13 To refute it is one aim of this biography. More generally, it seeks to reveal the human and revolutionary dimensions of her life, though to do this we must first understand what it was that carried with her, and confronted daily in her creative solitude-the problematic but richly instructive l.egacy of 'growing in cultures and re.moved from London where she passed her most creative years.