Cirrus@Austlit

Some of the finest works of Australian fiction were written by women who had left the country long before, yet whose memories of it were the strongest inspiration. Aged eighteen, Henry Handel Richardson left Australia in 1888 to study music at Leipzig. Her trilogy 'The Fortunes of Richard Mahony' (published in one volume in 1930) was written and researched in London, save for a two-month visit to 'Australia in 1912. Christina Stead, whose childhood was spent at Watsons Bay in Sydney before the Great War, dreamed passionately of a world elsewhere. Savings from teaching and office work enabled her to take ship for London in 1928. Hers would be one of the most fabled expatriate careers in Australian literature. While her novels remained unpublished here until the 1960s, she forged a reputation in Britain and the United States, before coming back in 1974 to a strange place that was in some ways still home. Her novel For Love Alone (1944) draws to rich effect on her young adult years of struggle in Sydney and then in London, as it tells the story of the indomitable Teresa Hawkins.' (Abstract)