The adventures of Cuffy Mahony and other stories

by Henry Handel Richardson

Trade paperback title, with two stories previously unpublished in book form, some of this material was published in 1934. 196 pages in all. Henry Richardson was one of Australia's greatest novelists and she shows her mastery of the short story in this title. She died in 1946.

Genres: Australia

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson Robertson for mixed motives used and adopted Henry Handel Richardson, a pen-name that probably militated against recognition especially when feminist literary history began. Maurice Guest was highly praised in Germany when it first appeared in translation in 1912, but received a bad press in England, though it influenced other novelists. The publishers bowdlerized the language for the second imprint. The trilogy suffered from the long intervals between its three volumes: Australia Felix (1917); The Way Home (1925) and Ultima Thule (1929). The last brought overnight fame and the three volumes were published as one in 1930. Her fame in England was short-lived; as late as 1977, when Virago Press republished The Getting of Wisdom, some London critics referred to the author as 'Mr Richardson'. Her short stories, The End of a Childhood (1934), and the novel, The Young Cosima (1939), had lukewarm receptions.

Henry Handel Richardson's place in Australian literature is important and secure. The Fortunes is an archetypal novel of the country, written about the great upsurge of nineteenth-century Western capitalism fuelled by the gold discoveries. With relentless objectivity it surveys all the main issues which were to define the direction of white Australian society from the 1850s onwards, within the domestic framework of a marriage. Powerfully symbolic in a realistic mode it is, as an English critic said in 1973, 'one of the great inexorable books of the world'.

Reviews

[Mandy Partridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to give this a 5 just to bring the 3 rating up to 4. Henry, or Ethel Richardson was a ground-breaking early Australian writer, and while these stories are not her best work, she deserves at least a 4. We remember the days when gays and lesbians pretended to be straight, but Ethel was writing in the day when she had to be Henry, to be published...

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Afterword to The Fortunes of Richard Mahony: The Adventures of Cuffy Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson. See my review at https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/10/22/t...

I'd give The Adventures of Cuffy Mahoney four stars, but the others are not so engaging.

HHR’s brilliance in depicting the emotional states of her characters is at its best in showing Cuffy’s distress at how things turn out for him. He was an unforgettable character in Ultima Thule but he will haunt the emotions of any reader who meets him in this short story.

And therein, for me, lies the limitation of the short story. I do so want to know what becomes of little Cuffy. Instead the collection goes on with Sketches of Girlhood, Two Tales of Old Strasbourg and three others which strained my patience altogether. These stories, do, as the blurb says, offer themes of separation, loss and acceptance through childhood, adolescence, marriage and ultimately death but I found most of them unsatisfying. ‘The Life and Death of Peterle Luthy’ and ‘Mary Christina’ are maudlin, while ‘The Coat’ tests credulity, and most of the girlhood stories are really rather mundane. Only ‘Two Hanged Women’ with its veiled lesbian storyline, and ‘Sister Ann’ exploring the neglected emotional life of a sister raising a horde of younger siblings, held any interest for me.

The collection was first published in 1979, when HHR had been dead for over 30 years, and I can’t help feeling that this was a case of resurrecting some stories which were not really her best work. Some of them are just sketches, as if preparatory for some other project and others read as if they are sorting out some long suppressed sexual feelings.