Is The Getting of Wisdom anti-feminist? Virginia Lloyd thinks so.

While Miles Franklin tends to get a lot of attention because of the literary award, another prominent Australian who chose to publish under a male pseudonym may not be so well known. That author is Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson, better known as Henry Handel Richardson. Richardson, a talented musician, was born in East Melbourne in 1870, but moved with her mother to Europe in 1888 so she could study at the Leipzig Conservatorium. She published several books, including Maurice Guest and the trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

This year, The Henry Handel Richardson Society is running the Henry Handel Richardson Centenary Writing Competition to celebrate the ex-pat author's only return to Australia in 1912. (Entries don't close till August 31, so there's plenty of time to enter.) Here author, editor and agent, Virgina Lloyd, reviews another of Richardson's novels, The Getting of Wisdom.

Virginia Lloyd writes:
 

The Brooklyn Public Library, a brisk ten-minute walk from my apartment, holds one copy of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (1910). It is a Dial Press tie-in edition to the 1977 film adaptation. The cover features a still photograph of Sigrid Thornton as the central character, Laura Tweedle Rambotham.

As the library’s holdings of Australian fiction are sparse, I was surprised but glad to find a copy locally. I’m researching musically trained women writers – of whom there are many – and I needed to read it: Henry Handel Richardson was a gifted pianist whose family travelled to Leipzig, Germany, in 1888 so she could pursue her studies. Her experiences as a student there led her to write her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908). Happily The Getting of Wisdom, Richardson’s second novel, is not only shorter but also a far more enjoyable reading experience - at least for this reader.

The ghost of Jane Eyre’s school, Lowood, haunts the pages of The Getting of Wisdom, which is primarily a coming of age story told through Laura’s eyes. In the opening pages of the novel we see Laura clash with her mother and feel stifled by the cloying attention of her younger sister, who goes by the nickname Pin. Laura feels more than ready for boarding school but is shocked and disoriented by the factional behaviour of the other girls once she gets there. Richardson vividly draws Laura’s horribly awkward first day at school and her inept efforts at trying to make friends. As an outgoing but poor student whose mother works for a living - a secret Laura tries hard to keep - she fails repeatedly to fit in to a culture that rejects idiosyncrasy. Richardson writes: Laura “suffered …and it was suffering; for her schoolfellows were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which makes a woman’s cruelty so hard to bear.” Unfortunately most women have experienced just this sort of thing at one time or another. My own experiences of being ostracized at school made these passages spring brilliantly to life.

My biggest disappointment with reading this 1910 novel in 2012 was that it struck me as anti-feminist. This is not just about the pseudonym that Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson chose to wear like a coat throughout her writing life. As Germaine Greer points out in the introduction to the Dial edition, the tradition of the pseudonymous woman writer had been well established by the Bronte sisters and numerous others over the 19^th century. Richardson claimed that she wanted to test the assertion that had been in the press at the time about how easy it was to distinguish a woman’s writing from a man’s. (Didn’t we just go through this with V. S. Naipaul’s sexist comments about being able to detect a women’s work within a couple of paragraphs - to smell, as Francine Prose put it in Harper’s, the estrogen in the ink? Plus ça change... .) As Greer says, “Why Henry Handel Richardson should have assumed her more ponderous male mask is not so readily apparent” when compared with someone like Marian Evans (George Eliot), whose books’ moral high ground would have been eroded by the revelation of her “scandalous private life”.

I suspect that the male pseudonym was for Richardson a more complicated issue than she would admit even to herself. On reading The Getting of Wisdom, I could not help but feel that Richardson had a great deal of ambivalence about being a woman.

In one early scene, an exasperated visiting teacher accuses Laura’s friend Inez  of having “a real woman’s brain: vague, slippery, inexact, interested only in the personal aspect of a thing.  You can’t concentrate your thoughts, and, worst of all, you’ve no curiosity – about anything that really matters. … It makes me ashamed to belong the same sex.” This condemnation of an entire sex on the basis of one lazy student seems extreme if not pathological. In terms of the plot, however, the teacher’s criticism provides Laura with the motivation she has lacked to now. The narrator writes of Laura: “[S]he did not want to have a woman’s brain, thank you; not one of that sort; and she smarted for the whole class.” From that moment on Laura applies herself to her studies and makes dramatic progress in all subjects except arithmetic.

The most independent woman in the novel is Laura’s financially independent aunt, who makes her own living, lives by herself, and helps Laura to get into the school and to keep her there. But Richardson describes her as “an independent, manly person”, which is a curious and pointed choice of adjective.

The logic of the novel seems to suggest that Laura’s striking independence of thought and behavior reflects the conscious turning away from the humiliation of having a “woman’s brain”. Perhaps in Richardson’s mind this includes being preoccupied with men and marriage. Laura’s lack of interest in these subjects for most of the novel is a refreshing change not only from the obsessions of her peers, but from the subject matter of much fiction both then and now.

In Laura, Richardson gives us a wonderfully complex character. She is willful and intelligent, if not terribly smart. Her lack of shyness causes her to leap into situations she lives to regret, such as when she plays the piano for the headmistress, who condemns her afterward for her “shameless” physical performance and her choice of repertoire (Thalberg instead of Mozart). Laura is vain, lonely, vulnerable, and prone to lying to impress friends. The hole she digs for herself over her stay at the house of the married curate, in which she invents an elaborate story about their wild romance, is hilarious.

I also loved the way Richardson draws this novel to a close. The final third is masterfully controlled in pacing and character development. For any other latecomers to the work I will not spoil it here. It is enough to say that Richardson takes Laura on an emotionally challenging journey towards the end of her school days, and is not afraid to make her heroine suffer.

Germaine Greer contended that The Getting of Wisdom is Richardson’s “only great book, precisely because the subject is like the rest of us, ordinary, and therefore deeply important.” I think Laura Rambotham is a character well worth getting to know. The novel is fascinating reading, if only to provoke a reader to think about how much, and how little, changes in the lives of women.

Viginia Lloyd is a Sydney-born Australian literary agent, editor and freelance writer who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, was published in 2009 by Penguin and is available from a major international bookseller as an ebook.