The Fortunes Of Richard Mahony: Text Classics
Text Classics
Henry Handel Richardson
Introduction by Peter Craven
He had never got within measurable distance of what he called life, at all…deep down in him, he knew, was an enormous residue of vitality…It was like a buried treasure, jealously kept for the event of his one day catching up with life: not the bare scramble for a living that here went by that name, but Life with a capital L.
Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush: elsewhere is always better.
Searching for a place, a meaning, a life, Mahony and his wife Mary journey from wealth to poverty, order to chaos, sanity to the asylum. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a towering novel.
Read ‘The case for The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’, at The Conversation.
andThe Fortunes Of Richard Mahony
‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a masterpiece, a great novel. Reading it was one of the most fulfilling literary experiences I’ve ever had.’
‘More than any other novel in our literature, more than Voss, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel… it is a mighty and moving work, this bursting at the seams anti-epic to the muse of a vanity which sees every golden bowl broken and every silver cord loosed.’
