Unmasked

Caroline Moorehead

Maurice Guest Henry Handel Richardson (Virago Modern Classics pp. 562, £3.50) The Getting of Wisdom Henry Handel Richardson (Virago Modern Classics pp. 233, £2.95) My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin (Virago Modern Classics pp. 232, £2.50) My Career goes Bung Miles Franklin (Virago Modern Classics pp. 234, £2.95) Olivia Olivia (The Hogarth Press pp. 109, £4.50) Both Henry Handel Richardson and Miles Franklin are now where they deserve to be: among the classics of Australian writing. But for both, who had a great deal in common, the road to recognition has been extremely long, possibly because of the anonymity and exile they chose. Both were women, born towards the end of the last century; both took men's Christian names to shelter behind; both wrote critically of the confined snobberies of Australian society — though Miles Franklin more bitingly than Henry Handel Richardson — and both left Australia, Mr Richardson never properly to return.

For her first book, Mr Richardson shed Australia altogether, Maurice Guest, often compared to Madame Bovary for the obsessive passion that dominates it, owes a great deal to the European romantic fiction of the 18th century (and perhaps to the Danish novelist J.P. Jacobson whom Mr Richardson translated). It took her 11 years to write, appeared in 1908 and was the fruit of her own life and experiences as a music student in Leipzig, where her family moved in 1888 in order for Ethel – Mr Richardson's real name — to pursue her studies.

Maurice Guest is a stolid, hopeful Englishman who leaves a teaching job to come to Germany to study conducting. In Leipzig barely a week, he catches sight of a young pianist, Louise Defrayer who is the mistress of a caddish musical genius called Schilsky. That they will have a love affair, and that it will be doomed, is apparent from the moment he dwells on 'this deep white skin, the purity of which was only broken by the pale red of the lips'. The affair itself does not take place until half-way into this long novel, but the rumbling sureness of its coming overshadows the lively scenes of Leipzig student life, with its skating parties and concerts, its cafés and the heated exchanges of student life. Mr Richardson took great care with and pleasure in her descriptions.

She was also fascinated by the power of obsession. Again and again, in Maurice Guest, she returns to this distinction between emotional involvement, which is pure, and obsessive love, which destroys. Early on, before Maurice has become irretrievably embroiled with Louise, he thinks to himself: 'Love was something frank and beautiful, made for daylight and the sun . . and yet . . did he close his eyes and let her face rise before him . . a tightening of all centres, a heightening of all faculties, an intense hope and as intense a despair'. One of Mr Richardson's strengths as a writer was this ability to show relationships not just from the point of view of each protagonist, but from that of onlookers as well: Maurice, a little wet, a little obvious, is also seen to be a hundred other, subtler things.

Mr Richardson was also good on change. One of the finest and most painful passages in. the book is the moment when Louise discovers that her part in this affair is over. She and Maurice have gone to the country, in memory of happier times. Maurice wades into marshy water to pick bullrushes for her. She watches him, with his cautious calculated movements, his absolute predictableness and, slowly, fills with anger. It is all there, the irritation, the sense of betrayal.

It was only two years later that Mr Richardson turned to The Getting of Wisdom, a book she described as 'merry', telling friends that her intention had been to make them laugh. Yet this considerably shorter and sharper novel about a 12-yearold girl sent from a genteel and poor home to ‘a Melbourne boarding school is also more stringent. The lightness, the `merri ness', are highly deceptive and make the more admired Maurice Guest seem overcrammed.

Laura Rambotham arrives at Mrs Gurley's school full of hope, a bright, even cocky child. Clever enough to realise instantly that 'the unpardonable sin is to vary from the common mould', she still cannot get anything right. She tries too hard. When she fawns, she is despised; when she holds off she is derided; when she is the object of another girl's crush, she is unbearably harsh; in love herself she becomes the object of ridicule. It takes all her schooling to acquire any wisdom at all.

In the end, Laura capitulates, but she is not broken. The final pages of The Getting of Wisdom are grimly smug, rather than sad, for Mr Richardson wrests moral tales from her characters. 'She could not know, that, even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found; seeming unfitness prove to be only another aspect of a peculiar and special fitness'. Laura has done what Maurice failed to do: adapt.

Ethel Richardson chose a man's name because, she said: 'There has been much talk about the ease with which a woman's work could be distinguished from a man's; and I wanted to try out the truth of this assertion'. Critics have since suggested that her real reason may have had more to do with shyness, and certainly she hung on to her anonymity with ferocity. But it did not protect her when she returned to Australia, to gather material for her later and more famous trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Her old school, the Presbyterian Ladies College, refused to receive her.

For Miles Franklin, the rebuff came quicker. A 16-year-old daughter of a cattle station owner who fell on hard times, she 'conceived and tossed off in a matter of weeks' a charming and highly romantic story of bush life, rich with the bigotries of local people: My Brilliant Career. Its heroine, Sybilla, is a first cousin of Laura Rambotham, an impetuous and ebullient girl who protects herself with a series of sardonic pleasantries. But the locals did not care to see themselves in this story of a girl who rejects a rich landowner for freedoin, and the hostile notoriety she attracted drove Mr Franklin to Sydney, where she worked as a maid while writing what was intended as a sober corrective. This fared no better. My Career goes Bung, witty, poking fun at the vanities of SydneY intellectuals, more assured but less mediately appealing than its predecessor, was turned down by publishers as too outspoken. Miles Franklin left Australia for America, then England. Neither book resurfaced for half a century.

To her perspicacity, Miles Franklin added one other note, muted in My Brilliant Career, louder in its sequel. While Mr Richardson made only one real allusion to what being a woman meant in turn-of-the century Australia ('You're blessed with a real woman's brain', she has one teacher say, 'vague, slippery, inexact, interested only in the personal aspect of the thing'), Mr Franklin chafed loudly and continuously at the 'dullness and hennishness' of women's lives.

Like My Brilliant Career, Olivia, which appeared anonymously ('by Olivia') in 1949, purported to be autobiographical. It is the account of a year spent by an English girl in a French school, and of her deepening infatuation for one of the teachers. Republished last month, it is now known to be the work of Dorothy Bussy, sister of Lytton Strachey and translator of Gide into English, and it is modelled on a real school, Les Avons, and a real teacher, a remarkable woman called Madeleine Souvestre.

The difference with Olivia lies in the use of memory, for the heroine is remembering, in later, life, a love she felt at 16. In her introduction, she noted the dangers of this kind of recall: 'I know. . . that the creature may become lean and hard . . . or lose its strength and purity and collapse into the amorphous deliquescence of sentimentality.' Dorothy Bussy did neither. Olivia has the cool tone distance can provide, while losing none of the tension. For those who have experienced it, Olivia is an acute reminder of the desolation of adolescent love.

Why did these writers choose to remain anonymous? And why were they so soon forgotten? All three wrote about passion and intensity — Maurice's obsession is no different from Olivia's — and all left a touching and memorable heroine, whose confusions and sufferings are ageless, yet also precisely of their time and place.

None of these women was unusual in taking a pseudonym the custom had been well established by George Eliot and the Bronte sisters — and they had, after all, gdod cause for apprehension. Miles Franklin, when attacked for the excellent My Brilliant Career felt bound to dismiss it as a 'girl's story'. The masculinity or femininity. of their style, or the topics they had the courage to take, need not be an issue today. But Henry Handel Richardson was undoubtedly right in suspecting that her book would have been read differently then if seen to be by a woman. For as much as anything else, these three women were writing about conformity, about the pressures towards it and the impossibility of resisting it, and the dangers of losing touch 'with reality, and dreaming dreams of imperceptible threads.' Their own distinctive way of conforming, as writers, was not to reveal their hands.