Download Penguin Classics Fortunes Of Richard Mahony fb2, epub

by Henry Handel Richardson,Michael Ackland,Dorothy Green

ISBN: 014043710X
Author: Henry Handel Richardson,Michael Ackland,Dorothy Green
Language: English
Publisher: Penguin Australia; New edition edition (July 6, 1999)
Pages: 841
Category: Classics
Subcategory: Literature
Rating: 4.8
Votes: 827
Size Fb2: 1608 kb
Size ePub: 1305 kb
Size Djvu: 1731 kb
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Henry Handel Richardson Michael Ackland Dorothy Green Classics English

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by Henry Handel Richardson (Author), Michael Ackland (Foreword), Dorothy Green (Foreword) & 0 more.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Richardson's famous trilogy about . Michael Ackland (2005) Henry Handel Richardson: A Life, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52184-055-2.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Richardson's famous trilogy about the slow decline, owing to character flaws and an unnamed brain disease, of a successful Australian physician and businessman and the emotional/financial effect on his family. It was highly praised by Sinclair Lewis, among others, and was inspired by Richardson's own family experiences.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a three-part novel by Australian writer Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson under her pen name, Henry Handel Richardson. It consists of Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929). It was collected in 1930 under the title by which it is now best known.

Henry Handel Richardson died in Sussex in 1946. PETER CRAVEN is one of Australia’s best-known literary critics. Only Australia could have coughed up The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. A doctor on the goldfields meets a girl and makes good. He thrives, he fails, he goes off his head. Also by henry handel richardson.

Henry Handel Richardson's great literary achievement, comprising the novels Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima .

Henry Handel Richardson's great literary achievement, comprising the novels Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, weaves together many themes.

Richard Mahony is a restless ma. Henry Handel Richardson was born in Melbourne in 1870. She was was sent to board at the Presbyterian Ladies College in 1883-an experience that provided material for her novel The Getting of Wisdom

Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush: elsewhere is always better. She was was sent to board at the Presbyterian Ladies College in 1883-an experience that provided material for her novel The Getting of Wisdom. She published her first novel, Maurice Guest, in 1908, followed by the trilogy that would become The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Her final novel The Young Cosima appeared in 1939. Peter Craven is one of Australia's best-known literary critics.

Henry Handel Richardson. Henry Handel Richardson. Richard Mahony is a restless man. The Getting of Wisdom, a wicked and satirical novel on the pain and confusing of growing up, first appeared in 1910. A century later it has lost none of its bite. In her splendid introduction Germaine Greer describes this classic as 'Richardson's only great book precisely because the subject is, like the rest of us, ordinary, and therefore deeply important'. spontaneity and skill; the values of a whole society are seen here in microcosm through the lives of pupils and teachers.

Henry Handel Richardson is celebrated for her classic Australian novels The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, yet her own life-story is still to be fully told. This enthralling 2004 book is a complete biography of this enigmatic Australian literary icon.

Richard Mahony is a restless man. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a towering vel. Product Identifiers.

Set in Australia during the gold-mining boom, this trilogy is comprised of the novels "Australia Felix", "The Way Home" and "Ultima Thule". It follows the fortunes of Mahony, a man increasingly dissatisfied with his ordered life.

Comments:

Delaath

If the characters were not so well done and did not develop so well over the book, you might call this book a high class soap...

Set before and after the Eureka Stockade (Australia's "Boston Tea Party" moment), this book tells the first part of the story of Dr Richard Mahoney and his wife Polly/Mary.

I can't wait to read the other two volumes of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony -- truly an Australian classic!

An Australian classic. The profoundly moving story of man who, at huge cost to his wife and later family, continually seeks to change his surroundings without succeeding in changing himself - a common human dilemma. Its historical context is also richly drawn. A must for all serious readers not just of Australian literature.

Syleazahad

kind of a boring plot, although the descriptions of the landscape were enjoyable. I didn't care enough about the characters to finish it.

Taur

This is the greatest Australian novel. Period. I believe Phillip Adams has been trying for many years to get it made into a movie. Do it Phillip!

Daigami

The book is set in mid 1800s Ballarat, Australia. The eponymous character is - at the start - in his late 20s, an Irish doctor who has come out to seek his fortune, and has abandoned his profession to run a - not particularly successful - store.
Matrimony comes quite early on when he marries the much younger Mary. Her gentle encouragement prompts him to resume his medical career and gradually they move up in the world. Yet his life is never his own, with her friends and family coming to stay or needing help. And while loving, Mary fails to fully understand her husband:
'He had no talent for friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing, and say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered friendship...Sometimes he felt like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which no one invited him to partake because he had already given it to be understood that he would decline.'
In the ensuing volumes, we see him finding great success. But life goes horribly wrong and Mary has to step up and take the reins... I particularly liked the way that the final volume is written in part from the viewpoint of their young son, Cuffy, and how his feelings and behaviour are shaped by being moved from pillar to post and having a Papa of whom he is ashamed.
Absolutely wonderful read that deserves to be better known.
Wonderful characterization and descriptions of Australian life at this time for both the haves and have-nots. Although written in 1917, I found the style very much of the Victorian era in which the book is set. Deserves to be much more famous than it is.

Faehn

First and longest volume of Richardson's 'Fortunes of Richard Mahony' trilogy.
The book is set in mid 1800s Ballarat, Australia. The eponymous character is in his late 20s, an Irish doctor who has come out to seek his fortune, and has abandoned his profession to run a - not particularly successful - store.
Matrimony comes quite early on when he marries the much younger Mary. Her gentle encouragement prompts him to resume his medical career and gradually they move up in the world. Yet his life is never his own, with her friends and family coming to stay or needing help. And while loving, Mary fails to fully understand her husband:
'He had no talent for friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing, and say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered friendship...Sometimes he felt like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which no one invited him to partake because he had already given it to be understood that he would decline.'
Wonderful characterization and descriptions of Australian life at this time for both the haves and have-nots. Although written in 1917, I found the style very much of the Victorian era in which the book is set. Deserves to be much more famous than it is.

Linn

"The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney" is actually a single-volume compilation of three separate novels by the Australian writer H.H. Richardson (a nom de plume of its female author.) The individual novels were published between the two wars and the last of the three, "Ultima Thule," achieved a mild, and certainly brief, popularity in the United States.

H.H. Richardson is known in America, if at all, for her short novel, "The Getting of Wisdom" which, some years ago, was made into a well-reviewed motion picture. Australian literature is little known in America, except perhaps for Patrick White ("The Tree Where Man Was Born") and Richardson's novels -- except for "The Getting of Wisdom" -- are unavailable in this country. Perhaps, for all I know, they are no longer in print in Australia.

"The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney" is a long work -- in excess of one-thousand pages -- and it proceeds slowly. It is set in the Australian goldfields of the mid-Victorian period, a time that resembled America's Wild West in many ways: raw, manly, dangerous and with money to be made for the right sort.

The plot weaves in and out of Mahoney's adventures as a frontier doctor and prospector for gold. The character of his wife is just as important as Mahoney's and certainly a lot more sympathetic. The details of these adventures are mildly interesting; but not enough so as to make it worth the reader's while to stay with them for a thousand pages.

The real brilliance of these novels -- and it is brilliance -- lies in its portrayal of the psychological disintegration of a human personality. And, here, the reader must admire most the author's self-discipline: nothing is rushed, nothing is anticipated, and everything is utterly believable when seen in retrospect. The author is almost sadistic as she patiently adds an incident here or a detail there that, taken altogether, document the decomposition of a human being. The reader, almost without knowing it, follows Mahoney's descent into the Pit, page by page. One is a bit bored, at first, by the slow pace of the writing; then one's interest is piqued as the main character increasingly begins to wobble off-center; and, finally, one watches Mahoney's ghastly end with horror.

I doubt that in America a dozen people a year -- if that -- read this novel. It deserves a wider audience, although it will never find one. Its account of the rotting away of one man's character and personality moves too slowly to ever make it popular. But, it is, all the same, beautifully controlled and convincing literature.