Novel
Australia Felix
Henry Handel Richardson · 1917
Opening lines
In a shaft on the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive. At work in a deep wet hole, he had recklessly omitted to slab the walls of a drive; uprights and tailors yielded under the lateral pressure, and the rotten earth collapsed, bringing down the roof in its train.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
In the early 1850s, Richard Mahony, a doctor trained in Edinburgh, keeps a store on the Ballarat goldfields. Sober and refined in manner, he struggles to win the respect of the miners, who are rough and hard-drinking, and his business declines. He marries Polly Turnham, a very young servant, who urges him to return to medicine; his Ballarat practice prospers and the couple live for a time in comfort, while, according to AustLit, the Eureka rebellion, the growth of the town and a hearing in Melbourne go by.
Context
First part of a trilogy that Heinemann brought together in one volume in 1930, the novel appeared in 1917; it is loosely inspired by the lives of the author's parents, without being a biography. She returned to Australia in 1912 to research her family's history. The first two parts sold poorly, and the publisher hesitated to publish the third, which received the Australian Literature Society's gold medal in 1929. For the 1930 edition, AustLit indicates that about twelve thousand words were cut from this first volume.
Who it is for
More than three hundred pages in English, which open a larger work but can be read on their own; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Sten Bodvar Liljegren proposed the author for the Nobel in 1939, the first Australian to be put forward in this way.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.