Green explains the rationale for the altered title as an attempt to ‘avoid confusion’ between Richardson’s hero ‘Richard Mahony’, and the image of the Wanderer which Ulysses connotes. (An image which Green rejects, incidentally: its application to Mahony is under poetic licence only). The original title, Ulysses Bound, writes Green, was meant to apply to Richardson herself: ‘... she bound herself, in self-defence, to the mast of her work’. The consequent ‘confusion’ lucidly bespeaks the interrelationship between Richardson and her fictionalised character as much as it tells us of the compulsion towards, and intuitions gleaned from, ‘reading in’: the reader will take a mile given an inch of classical allusion, let alone a mere snippet of biographical ‘fact’. Several times in the course of her study, Green comes back to this knotty history of misreading – primarily to what she considers the erroneous critical assessment of Richardson this century, which she seeks to correct.

Her book takes issue with the prevalent conception that Richardson suffered from a failure of imagination; that she worked as ‘victim’ under a ‘dictatorship of facts’. It is not only this perception of Richardson as an unimaginative chronicler which Green discredits, but also its false dichotomy between science and art, between reason and imagination. Green carefully examines a particular heritage of liberal ideology as it finds expression in this construc­tion of Richardson’s worth; she debates eloquently, precisely, and convincingly.

What is odd is her own frequent recourse to the tenets of scientific enquiry to describe, not simply the procedures of scholarly research, nor the propriety of ‘fact’ in literary criticism (these are recognisable as the unspelled ethics of academic research), but Richardson’s own modus operandi – if not, inadvertently, Green’s. For example, she answers the question of Richardson’s principal motivation in writing as follows:

In brief, to marshal evidence to support a truth she had perceived before she was ten years old and in so doing to attempt to understand how she came to be the kind of person she was, at the same time acquiring some insight into the general human condition’.

Within her own terms Green’s sense of Richardson appears to lodge in the very heart of this contradiction.

That there are other kinds of logic which may govern her book has been implied in the critical acclaim which met its first publication. The quality of rapprochement, if I may risk that metaphor, was remarked by several reviewers who were struck by the ‘sense of rapport’ and ‘harmony of minds’ for example, which her appreciation of Richardson reveals.

Although Green rejects the notion that her study can be read as a biography, and she treats Richardson’s ‘personal’ documents carefully, the inclusion and use of biographical information affords a subtle interchange between the narratives of Richardson’s life, and of her work. Clearly, the new title makes this more plainly ambiguous; it lights Richardson as distinct from her fiction yet admits their conjunction. The fact that her pseudonym ‘Henry Handel’ is itself an invention, a second self (something the portrait by Rupert Bunny, reproduced on the cover, begins to disclose), suggests again that the push to truth about the artist and her work may be more difficult than the discrete pronouncements which limpid syntax provides: ‘Henry Handel Richardson and the fiction of herself’ is not far from view.

Additional, unexpected views of Richardson come to light with the photographs this new edition contains. It is surprising how they complement Green’s text; many of them free Richardson from the dour portrait in profile, the heavy garments and ambience of a self-contained, secret life which has been her most characteristic press-release so far. They show her at different ages, grouped in company: with Robertson, her husband; in a garden with her sister Lilian, and her nephew (a vicarious image of the Madonna); standing on a pebbly beach with Olga Roncoroni; and the obligatory PLC portrait taken in 1887, where Richardson presents a wan face, not greatly different from those of the other girls who are awkwardly arrested, no, deployed, beside her, and where all possess that remarkable, vacant look peculiar to nineteenth-century photos: a commonality of regretful wisdom, as if they were waiting for trains.

Richardson emerges poised and seductive in several of the single studies (she is rarely unstudied), elusive, her right arm hidden (she suffered an extensive birthmark from shoulder to hand) and her face partially screened by the slash-band of her hat’s shadow when outside· it is with evident vulnerability that she carries a depth of interior living into these bright horizontal landscapes. The inclusion of these images animates the personality Green discerns within and without the fiction, partly because of the photography’s complex semiotics of defence and disclosure.

Pointedly, Green’s appended comments display her erudition and close knowledge of Richardson’s history – her career, her taste for walking and tennis, her love of cats, her chain-smoking – as well as the inevitable desire to people each frozen world: when Green notes under one photograph which thieves an unsuppressed moment of spontaneity that ‘HHR had a keen sense of humour, and enjoyed children and dogs’, it is difficult to judge exactly how laden the biographical facts might be.

Characteristically, the information is pertinent, perhaps more so because of its curious enjambment, and we cannot but note, in turn, that it is Green’s vision which instructs our own.

There are other photographs of place: the ivy-clad holiday home at Lyme Regis, Dorset, where Richardson met Olga Roncoroni; Maldon, where her mother was post-mistress after Walter Richardson’s death; a grim, empty-filled postcard of Koroit, the ‘Gymgurra’ of Ultima Thule; and a view of the unkempt back garden of the house at Queenscliff, the coastal setting in Ultima Thule of the scenes at Shortlands Bluff. In each photograph is the rich supposition that if we can only get a ‘look in’ we will be enabled to place Richardson in familiar country, even if that implies consideration of difficult, and sometimes destitute, landscapes. Green’s book reminds us that, as an expatriate, Richardson went further afield.

The fact that Richardson is hard to get at is a fact of the first order, it drives Green’s study and its extraordinary wealth of scholarship. In the afterword, Green considers material which has recently become available. This includes a reappraisal of the role Olga Roncoroni played in relation to Richardson, based on Green’s correspondence and meeting with her subsequent to the publication of Ulysses Bound; it takes into account an important article on Roncoroni by her friend and executrix, Margaret Capon. Green puts paid to the notion that Roncoroni was a mere ‘handmaid to a genius’, an idea inculcated by Nettie Palmer – captivated and intrigued as she was, herself, by Richardson. Here Roncoroni takes shape as a personality in her own right.

The question of Richardson’s possible homosexuality is one which Green leaves until more substantial evidence can be proffered than idle speculation; its relevance to Richardson’s work she considers subsidiary. This issue and other feminist concerns she deals with smartly, in the terms of her original intention to redeem Richardson from the charge of being an unimaginative and second-rate writer; by implication, from being a ‘woman’ writer assessed by Australian male criticism in the 1940s and later. I would add, however, that the nexus between gendered subjectivity and the history of Richardson’s literary reception here is a significant and complicated one.

In Richardson’s later diaries those deposited in the National Library after Roncoroni’s death. Green finds further testimonial for her previous interpretations of the novels and her understanding of Richardson’s life. What emerges is the imperative sense of dependency Richardson projects, especially in her closely bound domestic life, and in her great attachment to Robertson; the evening of his death, 28 May 1933, finds Richardson and her brother-in-law, A.S. Neill, in séance together, with Ouija-board, in an attempt to re-establish her husband’s presence. Richardson’s belief in Spiritualism remained unshakable; she was reading chapters ‘to’ Robertson from a novel she began in 1939 but later abandoned.

Green also considers recent developments in Richardson scholarship, notably two medical contributions, one of which sheds further light on the dementia Mahony suffers in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. She previews a correspondence of 1910–14 between Richardson and a French translator whose work on Maurice Guest is unfortunately lost, letters which Green is presently co-editing; and she surveys the collection of earlier papers which were made available at the time Ulysses Bound was in press (some are referred to in the Appendix to that volume). From this continuing scholarship another narrative appears: a tale of papers lost and found, in transit and on hold (Richardson’s letters to Mary Kernot, her school friend, are not due for release until 1996); a narrative in chiaroscuro worthy of and highly coincidental with Richardson herself. This new edition of Green’s work shows how endless the recovery of a literary life can be; in particular, how ‘afterwords’ are never the last words.

Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction is its own kind of classic. The writer within, and I shall leave that open, is indeed formidable, deserving of more than simple praise.