Henry Handel Richardson and Marie Hansen: Musical Lives in Fact and Fiction

Australia’s most internationally celebrated author of the first half of the twentieth century, Henry Handel Richardson (1870–1946), was at one time an aspiring concert pianist who also had a flair for music composition. Richardson’s accounts of her talents and achievements in music performance during her school days in Melbourne, and then at the Leipzig Conservatorium of Music, have been at best vague and at worst misleading. This article seeks to address the issues relating to Richardson’s musical training, competence, and reasons for abandoning a career of performance, through a comparative analysis with her friend and rival, Marie Hansen. An assessment of their shared and separate musical development in Melbourne and Leipzig calls for a re-evaluation of Richardson’s versions of events and, connectedly, the biographical interpretations that have followed.