Henry Handel Richardson wrote novels that are among the most ambitious and intellectual ever written by an Australian; they have frequently been judged "great" by readers and critics. Her writing engaged with the major aesthetic arguments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as describing in close detail aspects of Australian and European life that she and her family had experienced. Her culminating achievement, the trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (published under separate titles in 1917, 1925, and 1929; published under a single title in 1930), demonstrated that Australians and their experiences could be worthy of the detailed attention and panoramic perspective found in the fiction of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

Richardson began as a realist in the tradition of the European naturalists, but her novels applied naturalist techniques with a twentieth-century self-consciousness. In her fiction she developed these techniques and preoccupations to pursue a more...