The Way Home - Richardson, Henry Handel

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Résumé :
The Way Home (1925) is a novel by Henry Handel Richardson. Based on the life of her parents, The Way Home is the second in a trilogy of novels later published as The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930). The trilogy has earned praise from countless authors and critics for its startling depictions of a man's decline due to mental illness and the lengths to which his wife must go to care for their young family. In this pleasant spot Richard Mahony had made his home. Here, too, he had found the house of his dreams. It was built of stone-under a tangle of creeper-was very old, very solid: floors did not shake to your tread, and, shut within the four walls of a room, voices lost their carrying power. But its privacy was what he valued most. After years of struggle in the Australian outback, Richard Mahony returns to his native England to live out his years in comfort and quiet. Although his dreams have been realized, he soon discovers the prejudice with which the wealthy view men who went across the world to make their fortunes. Unable to gain a foothold in the land of his birth, he makes the difficult decision to return to Australia. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Henry Handel Richardson's The Way Home is a classic of Australian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Biographie:

Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946) was the pen name of Australian novelist Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson. Born in East Melbourne, she was raised in a series of towns across Victoria with her mother and siblings following her father's death. At thirteen, she left Maldon-where her mother worked as the local postmistress-to attend Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne. Her time there would inspire her bestselling coming-of-age novel The Getting of Wisdom (1910). Upon graduating in 1888, Richardson moved with her family to Germany to study music at the Leipzig Conservatorium. In 1894, she married John George Robertson, whom she met in Leipzig while he was studying German literature. They moved to London in 1903, where Richardson would publish Maurice Guest (1908), her debut novel. In 1912, Richardson returned to Australia to begin researching for her critically acclaimed trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which consists of the novels Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929). Partly based on her own family's history, the trilogy earned praise from such figures as Sinclair Lewis for its startling depictions of a man's decline due to mental illness and the lengths to which his wife must go to care for their young family.