orig. Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson
born Jan. 3, 1870, Melbourne, Austl.
died March 20, 1946, Fairlight, Sussex, Eng.
Australian-born English novelist.
In 1888 she left Australia to study music in Germany, and she spent the rest of her life abroad, settling in England in 1904 with her husband, J.G. Robertson. Maurice Guest (1908), her antiromantic first novel, concerns a music student's disastrous love affair. Her masterpiece, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony , 3 vol. (191729), combining description of an Australian immigrant's life and work in the goldfields with a powerful character study, is considered the crowning achievement of modern Australian fiction to that time.