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Australia Felix
Australia Felix
Australia Felix
Audiobook14 hours

Australia Felix

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About this audiobook

Australia Felix (1917) by Henry Handel Richardson is the first novel in the trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. "Australia Felix" is a description used by explorer Major Thomas Mitchell in 1836 for the lush plains he discovered between the Murray River and the south coast of Victoria, including the area that later became the site of Ballarat. The novel introduces the reader to Dr. Richard Townshend-Mahony, from Edinburgh, the proprietor of Diggers' Emporium in Ballarat township, near Melbourne, Australia, which he runs with his assistants. He came to the goldfields in 1852 based on advertising that made gold seem easy to acquire. He marries a servant girl from a hotel, and after his store has to be closed, he becomes a successful physician. The more successful Mahony gets, the more he longs to return to England. In the novel the reader can follow the tragedies and successes of him and of his wife's family.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 28, 2019
Author

Henry Handel Richardson

Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946) was the pen name of Australian novelist Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson. Born in East Melbourne, she was raised in a series of towns across Victoria with her mother and siblings following her father’s death. At thirteen, she left Maldon—where her mother worked as the local postmistress—to attend Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne. Her time there would inspire her bestselling coming-of-age novel The Getting of Wisdom (1910). Upon graduating in 1888, Richardson moved with her family to Germany to study music at the Leipzig Conservatorium. In 1894, she married John George Robertson, whom she met in Leipzig while he was studying German literature. They moved to London in 1903, where Richardson would publish Maurice Guest (1908), her debut novel. In 1912, Richardson returned to Australia to begin researching for her critically acclaimed trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which consists of the novels Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929). Partly based on her own family’s history, the trilogy earned praise from such figures as Sinclair Lewis for its startling depictions of a man’s decline due to mental illness and the lengths to which his wife must go to care for their young family.

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