The Fortunes of Richard Mahony : Text Classics

Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush: elsewhere is always better. Searching for a place, a meaning, a life, Mahony and his wife Mary journey from wealth to poverty, order to chaos, sanity to the asylum. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a towering novel. This edition reproduces the text of the 1930 Heinemann edition, which gathered all three books in one volume. It includes a new introduction by Peter Craven. 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 . 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. He was a founding editor of Scripsi , Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies. textclassics.com.au 'More than any other novel in our literature, more than Voss , The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel...it is a mighty and moving work, this bursting at the seams anti-epic to the muse of a vanity which sees every golden bowl broken and every silver cord loosed.' Peter Craven He had never got within measurable distance of what he called life, at all -- deep down in him, he knew, was an enormous residue of vitality. It was like a buried treasure, jealously kept for the event of his one day catching up with life : not the bare scramble for a living that here went by that name, but Life with a capital L. Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush : elsewhere is always better. Searching for a place, a meaning, a life, Mahony and his wife Mary journey from wealth to poverty, order to chaos, sanity to the asylum

Richard Mahony is a restless man. Loyally supported by his wife Mary, he journeys from shopkeeping to medicine, from poverty to wealth, from order to chaos. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is recognized as one of the greatest novels in the English language, and is arguably the Great Australian Novel.