The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

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.


This edition reproduces the text of the 1930 Heinemann edition, which gathered all three books in one volume. It includes a new introduction by Peter Craven.


Henry Handel Richardson was born in Melbourne in 1870. She was was sent to board at the Presbyterian Ladies College in 1883—an experience that provided material for her novel The Getting of Wisdom. She published her first novel, Maurice Guest, in 1908, followed by the trilogy that would become The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Her final novel The Young Cosima appeared in 1939.


Peter Craven is one of Australia's best-known literary critics. He was a founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies.

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'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.’ Peter Craven