The Getting of Wisdom (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Henry Handel Richardson

Published in 1910, this coming-of-age novel was based on the author's teenage experiences as a boarder at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne from 1883-87.  Her heroine, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, comes from a once well-off family now fallen on hard times.  Smart and strong willed, Laura is hard pressed to retain her self-possession amid the countless small, tawdry humiliations of boarding-school life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411450257

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.

Reviews for The Getting of Wisdom (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[veracite · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very much enjoyed this story of a bright, imaginative, bossy girl running smack into a society she doesn't understand and continues to fail to understand, hard as she tries to win friends and influence people.

[chris486_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How I love this book… just as much now as when I read it for the first time as a teenager! Set at the turn of the 20th century, it is the story of Laura Rambotham, a clever and spirited child, who leaves home to attend a prestigious Melbourne boarding school for young ladies at the insistence of her mother, even though it is a financial struggle for the family. Laura finds herself in a social setting that she neither understands, nor that understands her. She is a misfit who struggles valiantly to blend in and win friends—to be like the others—but never quite succeeds. This creates some sad, but also amusing incidents. Ultimately, the book is a celebration of the freedom that comes from being yourself—a poignant, timeless lesson for us all.

[thesmellofbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am gobsmacked.The novel begins as an entertaining tale of a headstrong young Australian girl going to meet the world at boarding school. It gradually evolves into a subtle, simple, and stunningly real observation of the pressures of conformity and the intolerance of naïveté, which, when paired with a strong desire to be accepted, can lead to many and often rending responses in an imaginative young person.Yet it is not a tragedy. I am left moved, affectionate, a little worried about the future, and yet joyful at the intactness of the protagonist's resilient soul.It is the rare sort of book that provokes deep self-reflection and a nudge in the direction of peace-making with self and life, and in this way brings to mind [[George Eliot]]'s [Middlemarch].Bravo, Ms Richardson.

[lisamorr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This Virago Modern Classic is about a twelve-year old girl sent to boarding school from her home in the country where she lived with her Mom and sister and two brothers. The title is a bit of an oxymoron in that boarding school doesn't teach her to be wise at all, but to fit in. Kind of sad.

[therebelprince · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A lovely book, set in the 1890s but published in 1910, that approaches the "new child at school" trope so popular in British literature of the time and subverts it with a subtly Aussie skewer. The female writer (pseudonymously a man) creates some believable characters, especially in the heroine Laura, and ultimately tells the tale of a square peg who refuses to "be approved" by the round hole of her school, and thus of society. Is it a feminist novel? I'm not sure. But it's the kind of children's literature that could still be appreciated, I hope, by another generation.

[kayclifton · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Can't believe I gave this books 5 stars on first reading. I could barely finish it on reread. Unrelenting dreariness which I kept expecting to let up and it continued till the end.

[tzelman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wisdom as conditioned stuffiness--Obsessive Laura is appealing nonetheless, but this novel doesn't know where to go

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was mentioned in Dictionary of Lost Words and I took the hint.Published in 1910 it tells the semi-autobiographical story of a girl from rural Australia going to boarding school in Melbourne, and her growing maturity in thought and action.The writing is good, and the lead character is very 'alive', making the whole thing an enjoyable experience. More than 100 years old now, I was taken by both how much the world had changed, and how so many things were much the same. Thought provoking.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the classics of Australian literature, a hectic, ironic description of a young girl's experience at a classy but morally and intellectually stultifying boarding school in Melbourne somewhere around 1900. She arrives there lively, spontaneous and imaginative; when she leaves four or five years later she's turned into a calculating, rather snobbish hypocrite. In the meantime she faces humiliation from classmates finding out about her family's relative poverty (her mother is a widow who works to support the children) and she goes through all the classic boarding school experiences: "crushes", jealousies, deceptions, religious and literary enthusiasms, bullying and being bullied, etc. But it all happens at a breathless pace, and we really get the feeling that poor Laura has no time to draw breath and grow up in peace.It's a formidable attack on contemporary notions of what middle-class young women were supposed to grow up into, as well as on the low quality of the education available to them. And by the standards of the time, it's also pretty outspoken about things like the total lack of sex-education. No wonder that H.G. Wells admired it (although one suspects that H.G. Wells would have enjoyed any book that featured teenage girls in an atmosphere of hothouse sexuality...). Despite being very political, it's always light and often very funny in tone, and it even has something very like an optimistic ending. If you think about other campaigning novels about education set about the same time - Young Torless and The child Manuela were the two that sprang to my mind, for instance - that's quite something.