Biography: Can there be so many writers of genius so little known - in this hemisphere at least - as Henry Handel Richardson?
In her native Australia her reputation does appear to be established. The trilogy of novels that make up The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney is a hugely powerful depiction of Australian life in the late 19th century and the dramatic decline of a family that can reduce a reader to tears.
So who was Henry Handel Richardson? This first full-length biography, by Michael Ackland, is by no means the whole story, but it is fascinating because of the questions it does answer about a writer so committed to being mysterious.
One of Ackland's strengths is his thorough research into the tragic life of her father, Walter Richardson, on which the Richard Mahoney character of the novels is closely based. We could be justified in co-opting her as partly ours: Walter Richardson was Irish.
He was born in Malahide, Co Dublin, of genteel Protestant stock. As a young man he left Dublin to study medicine in Edinburgh and fetched up in Melbourne in 1852 in the hope, as his daughter wrote, "of digging up a fortune". He made a happy marriage there to a resourceful and loving Yorkshire woman and had two daughters, Ettie - the future Henry Handel Richardson - and Lil. He did make a fortune but lost it again, and died of syphilitic "general paralysis of the insane" in 1879 when Ettie was nine, leaving the family penniless and emotionally exhausted.
This is the story told in the novels, transmuted by the imagination into a consummate study of the power of love, the corrosive effects of money-getting, colonial culture and much else. The restless, tragic Richard Mahoney and his struggle for integrity is deeply sympathetic and he reflects in many ways the Walter Richardson revealed by Ackland. But Henry Handel wrote that Mahoney was really a portrayal of herself - in the way that Emma Bovary was Flaubert.
ON THE SURFACE, her own life was not tragic. Probably its most crucial event was her move to Europe as a young woman. Both she and Lil were talented pianists and their mother, who had recouped the family fortunes to a degree and had great hopes for Ettie, took them to study in the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany.
More gifted as a composer and phobic about being stared at on stage, Ettie's success was disappointingly muted. But in Leipzig she began Maurice Guest, her first novel - which made her name but was soon out of print - and met her husband, George Robertson, a Scottish scholar of German. He would be her stay and prop in every conceivable way.
The naming of her central character as Richard Mahoney shows her awareness of her father's Irishness. And she herself must have felt Irish because she and George chose to be married in Clontarf. They walked on Howth Head and may, from a reference in one of the novels, have visited relations in Merrion Square - not a happy memory if true. She seems to have never come back to Ireland. When George was appointed to the chair of German at London University, they settled in Regents Park, where Ettie turned herself into Henry Handel Richardson. She was ferocious about this transformation. "Go down to posterity as Ettie R I will not," she insisted. Everyone called her Henry and her readers were rarely aware that she was a woman.
Outwardly, Henry and George lived the sedate life of well-to-do intellectuals in the early 20th century: the big house run by servants, the pets, the motoring trips, hikes in the Alps, mild eccentricities such as a devotion - like her father before her - to spiritualism and the paranormal (though in his case it damaged his career as a doctor). She and Lil, also like their father, were progressive thinkers. Lil married the educational ideologue AS Neill, and Henry found Summerhill for them, the house for the rampantly liberal school.
But her inner life, by her own account, was tumultuous and her self-image precarious, though bolstered by a big intellect, Nietzschean and Freudian influences and a huge imagination. Because it seems to jar with the raw energy of her books, this cossetted life is a surprise. The household was organised around her work. While she breakfasted in bed, her soundproofed study was cleaned by one of the four servants, and furnished with a stack of fresh paper and a tray "of thin light pencils sharpened by George". At 11am "a small cup of mocha coffee with cream and a dish of fruit" were brought up to her. In the afternoon she emerged "a wreck" to eat a hearty lunch (according to Ackland she ate "a pound of butter a week and three or four dishes of stewed fruits every day"), read on her couch for an hour and then took her daily walk, always tramping the same route.
DESPITE THIS RIGID routine, her "hard, unsentimental books", as she called them, were written slowly and in obscurity. In 1929 Ultima Thule, the final volume of the trilogy, had to self-published when her publishers, Heinemann, refused it, "horrified", as she wrote, "by the stark undiluted tragedy of it". But it was recognised at once as another masterpiece. "What English novel can be placed in front of this one?" asked one reviewer.
She seems to have been sexually ambivalent. Given to infatuations with women, her relationship in later life with the troubled Olga Roncoroni is mysterious. Though she had her psychoanalysed and helped her to make an independent living as a teacher of eurythmics, Olga was her sole and ever-faithful companion after George died and she was afflicted with a gruesome illness. During the war they lived on the south coast in "Bomb Alley", directly in the path of the German bombers, their house shaking with noise and crumbling from ack-ack fallout.
Ackland has taken pains with this book. But in the end the impression is of a still-enigmatic phenomenon. I for one now eagerly await a longer, and perhaps more curious and empathic exploration.
• Anne Haverty was recently Visiting Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
Henry Handel Richardson: A life by Michael Ackland, Cambridge University Press 326pp £45