One the strands plaiting along here is the resonance between a European writer like Joyce and his faraway counterparts in Australia. One of the more interesting ones I find is Joseph Furphy and of course that most Euopean of influenced pianists, HH Richardson. I've read her novels apart from 'Maurice Guest' which is, ironically, her first.
Susan Lever has written extensively on HHR and here are her words on the novelist's reaction to the Joyce influence:
Susan Lever has written extensively on HHR and here are her words on the novelist's reaction to the Joyce influence:
Maurice Guest explores the internal lives of its characters—the kind of exploration which James Joyce and other writers would develop into a full-blown modernist style. Joyce's work provides an appropriate reference point for Richardson's fiction because his first book, Dubliners (1914) developed, like her earliest work, from a naturalist impulse; and his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) has similarities with The Getting of Wisdom (1910) which she was pleased to see noted by critics.4
In this chapter of her book A Kind of Romance: Henry Handel Richardson's ‘Maurice Guest’, Lever is arguing that HHR's books bridged 19th century realism and the psycholigical introspection and self-awareness narratives of modernist literature. It's quite a neat bridge, but steers me back to Such is Life which is on neither side of that chronologically sound bridge, but splashing about in the river below. Furphy's "novel" is as much about experimentation as it is a romp through colonial Australian literary landscapes. It's a kind of pastorale circus, and an unusual precursor, in terms of the newish national voice, of the serious books of HHR which emerged later.
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