This is the first full-length British study on the work of the novelist Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946) who is attracting new and deserved attention. Born in Australia as Ethel Florence Richardson, and educated in Melbourne, she spent many years studying music and literature in Germany. From 1904 she lived in England where she published six novels and some short stories. The Getting of Wisdom (1910) was adapted as a much-praised Australian film in 1977. Her masterpiece, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1929) made her briefly famous. in Britain and the United States in the nineteen-thirties and is now being turned into an Australian television film epic. Karen McLeod's study contains a brief biography, a fuller description of the novelist's unusual cultural background, and a detailed critical account of all her novels and stories. Her links with European literature and her claim to be considered a major English novelist are also discussed. The book contains a number of previously unpublished photographs of Henry Handel Richardson.