Henry Handel Richardson was the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870-1946), an expatriate Australian novelist. She based a series of novels on characters and incidents taken mainly from her life.

Born in Melbourne on Jan. 3, 1870, Ethel Richardson was the daughter of an Irish doctor who emigrated in the 1850s, living at first on the Victorian goldfields and later practicing in Melbourne. During a generally unhappy childhood she attended the Presbyterian Ladies' College, and after her father's death she taught briefly as a governess. At 17, she went abroad with her mother and sister; she studied music at Leipzig and in 1895 married a Scottish student, John G. Robertson, meanwhile studying the masters of the European novel.

Henry Handel Richardson began her literary career as a translator of Niels Lyhne by Danish novelist Jens Jacobsen; this was published as Siren Voices (1896). Jacobsen's style--"romanticism imbued with the scientific spirit...