Review of Henry Handel Richardson, by Michael Ackland, Henry Handel Richardson, edited by Susan Lever and Catherine Pratt, and The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature, by Irina Grigorescu Pana

Abstract

It is fascinating to watch the ebbs and flows of the reputations of various Australian writers. Someone like Douglas Stewart, for example, for years so much at the centre of Australian literary culture, has since his death become something of a non-person, as most recently witnessed in his absence from Peter Porter's new Oxford anthology of modern Australian verse. While Henry Handel Richardson has been a recognised member of the Australian literary canon since the 1930s, interest in her work has gone through at least three phases. The years immediately after her death in 1946 were marked by Nettie Palmer's study and a volume of reminiscences, as well as the posthumous publication of Myself When Young. After Australian Literature became an acceptable subject for university study in the 1960s, Richardson's work underwent more intensive scrutiny, culminating in Dorothy Green's Ulysses Bound in 1973. Now, fifty years after her death, as Richardson's works come out of copyright and letters to her friend Mary Kernot finally become available, we appear to be entering a new phase, one particularly marked by the undertaking of critical editions.