May 31, 2025
A talk given at PLC in Melbourne on May 31, 2025
So here we are at PLC, the academic creme de la creme of schools I gather, and it seems a suitable time to take education which has impacted mightily on the lives of both my great aunt Henry Handel Richardson and her far less known, but pioneering, sister Lil as my theme today.
Both Henry – or Ettie as she was then known – and Lil attended PLC, but Henry came first as a twelve-year-old and was boarding. Anyone who has read the savage satirical novel The Getting of Wisdom which she wrote about the experience will know that she was an unhappy child who always felt a tormented misfit.
For all my pertness, I was acutely sensitive to snubs and sneers, I came in for a very bad time… I was considered odd and unaccountable. Often to my own bewilderment, for I tried hard to adapt myself to my companions’ way of thinking‘
The Getting of Wisdom was considered such a travesty by those running PLC that Henry was banned henceforth from visiting. So it is a pleasure to see the wound healed and to be here to celebrate Henry and her mighty achievements as a writer, and as an alumna of PLC.
I intend to try to unravel a bit of what may have lain behind the anguished fury Ettie felt towards PLC and the staff, which she experienced as harsh at times to the point of cruelty, and also from students, many from upper class, moneyed families whom she saw as looking down at her for coming from a family where her mother had to work to earn a living and mocked her for her homemade clothes, her inability to adopt their values or lighten up a bit.
Perhaps at that time PLC was as grim as Ettie experienced it, but I believe that life circumstances had much to do with her being in a state of rage and upset. Her father Walter, to whom she was devoted, had descended into madness until he died a hideous death. Ettie had found it enormously hard to grieve in the open, acceptable way Lil had with outbursts of tears, damp lace hankies and melancholy. Ettie had brought the portcullis down on her emotions and appeared to the outside world as hard and unfeeling, yet in her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony modelled on her father and his life and fate reveals how much grief and desolation Ettie experienced.
On top of this Ettie and Lil had just moved, with their mother Mary, to a home in Maldon with a garden full of wonderful greenery, flowers, trees. They were finding happiness again, for the first time in a long while. But within three years Mary had sent Ettie off to PLC having learned it was academically the best place she could go, and she was able to get help with the fees. But it is not difficult to visualise how desperately abandoned Ettie felt, not least because throughout life she was convinced Mary preferred Lil her second born – a pretty, amenable child who cleaved to her mother – over Ettie’s spidery dark appearance and spiky personality.
Once the girls’ mother Mary had moved to Melbourne, Lil too went to PLC but as a day girl who appears to have fitted in comfortably. Both left having done well academically and the evidence of just what a fine academic education Henry had is visible in the books she wrote and which led her to write the intellectual literature for which she became one of Australia’s prized writers.
Mary gave the girls their first taste of feminism by defying the men in Maldon who said a woman post-mistress, as she was, would never match what a man could do running the business. In fact, she was more successful than her male predecessor. Mary sold her Australian home and with her eye still firmly on education she took her daughters, who had both been musical successes at PLC, first to Leipzig then to Munich to study under the very best tutors. It was during this time that both met their husbands – Ettie married George Robertson, a brilliant Scottish academic who was hugely encouraging of her writing, and Lil married Otto, a German Jewish opthalmologist.
The sisters went through a good deal of sibling strife and stress as well as love and caring for each other through their growing years, but once married they were close and saw a good deal of each other. And Lil helped Ettie, at the crucial moment when publication of Henry’s first novel Maurice Guest seemed close, to choose an authorial name. I have imagined the scene when this happened and shall read you the excerpt:
Ettie turned to her sister for help. Lil had been cheer-leader for ‘Maurice Guest’ since her elder sibling had begun this first novel. When Ettie was at her most despondent, it was Lil who boosted her, insisting that this story must be written. So the sisters, with bowed heads and earnest sighs, addressed the problem of finding a suitable name for the author. Plenty of thoughts just did not feel right, but then came inspiration, the name of a distant relative: Henry Handel Richardson.
I see the sisters clapping their hands in glee at having found a name that worked so very well. It was muscular, refined, and embodied the sisters’ family name of Richardson.
In 1908 Maurice Guest was published and got some reviews most writers dream of and never get. She was an established author. At the same time Henry, as I shall call her from now on, put Lil on a vital political trajectory.
In 1909 Henry began subscribing to the publication Votes for Women and became an active supporter of the suffragette movement. She sent the publications to Lil. On March 12th Lil, fired up with suffragette anger joined some 150 women smashing windows of public buildings across London, demanding to be given the vote. Henry was forbidden by George to take part because of her frail health but there was no stopping Lil. So this was the kick-start to Lil’s political awakening, the beginning of the profound shift she was to make from a young woman fretful and restless while living an indulgent life among bourgeois German people. Very different values would take over as feminism became central in Lil’s life. She went to prison as punishment, for two months. It was a huge shock after the refined life she had led and a vital opening to new ideas influencing her afterwards.
I grew up knowing the facts: my grandmother had been in prison for breaking a window because she wanted the same voting rights as men. It sounded quaint and frankly odd to me when I was little, but when I joined The Guardian newspaper in London in the 1970s as a writer, and found feminism erupting and taking its new form, I learned a compelling context for my grandmother. I wonder if her bloodline directed me so that I got much involved with women’s rights and led me to write a book Hyenas in Petticoats, which looked at the way feminism played out between 1968 – 1988.
In 1910 Henry and George had moved to an elegant Regency home in Regents Park, London and writing was the beating heart of Henry ’s life and one so demanding of her entire being that anyone who disturbed her, uninvited, could expect a glacial response. Not for her the welcome distraction of an unexpected visit or an unsolicited cup of tea brought up by the maid. From 8 a.m. every morning she shut the door to hold at bay a life so full of threats to the absolute concentration she needed. She reflected the way TS Eliot expressed the imperative to find the exact way she shared
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision…
It mattered a good deal to Ettie that girls could match men with their academic skills. She expresses this through her fictional autobiographical character Laura in The Getting of Wisdom. Henry’s novel writing was ever attentive to her society’s two-tier view of the different genders, the way it casually diminished women in the way they were spoken about. She translated her disgust at the kind of talk that was all too often a lingua franca for men, into words of student Krafft talking to Maurice Guest:
She wouldn’t thank you to be treated differently. Believe me, women are all alike; they are made to be trodden on. Ill-usage brings out their good points—just as kneading makes dough light. Let them alone, or pamper them, and they spread like a weed, and choke you”—and he quoted a saying about going to women and not forgetting the whip, at which Maurice stood aghast. “But why, if you despise a person like that—why have her always about you?” he cried, at the end of a flaming plea for woman’s dignity and worth. Krafft shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose the truth is we are dependent on them—yes, dependent, from the moment we are laid in the cradle.
But now I shall bring Lil into focus for it was education, not at PLC but the school, Summerhill which she founded with the unorthodox educationalist, A.S.Neill that shaped a large part of her life.
The genesis of this radical move in Lil’s life occurred on an occasion when she was staying with Henry. Walter, Lil’s son , who was at King Alfred School in London, and lived at the invitation of Henry and George in their home until his education ended, brought A.S.Neill, his teacher, home to tea . Neill stayed for four hours telling Lil of his radical idea for a school where children could be free and happy to do much as they chose and where emotions were not neglected in order to develop the intellect . He followed this up with more visits talking of creating a school to contrast with the cruel harsh way he had had to treat pupils at the Scottish school where he had been a primary teacher Lil was seduced by his ideas not least, I am convinced, because she recalled how unhappy Ettie had been at PLC and how little the school had allowed her individualism.
Lil told Otto she planned to make this school a reality with Neill. Her marriage to Otto, had been emptied of chemistry, during years of separation during the First World War when Otto had to live in Germany and Lil in England, but Otto became very fond of Neill and helped them find a property in Hellerau where he was living. The school opened in 1922 with children sent by parents who had heard of and liked Neill’s ideas. The school had some Jewish students but anti-semitism became ever more fierce in the Saxony area where the school was based and Neill and Lil knew they they must move . They took a space in a monastery in Austria, but the locals thought the children all heathens and the school was forced to go.
It had taken a long and often hard journey for Lil to achieve the confidence and conviction to plough her own, idiosyncratic furrow. For many of her young years Henry’s urgent need to assert supremacy over her much loved and admired baby sister led to her diminishing Lil with faint praise and words that surely underlay Lil’s lack of self-confidence and awareness of her own potential. On one occasion Henry said of her sister, ‘Wit and brilliance were not required of Lil’.
But now, in 1924, Henry proved a wonderful sister. She put considerable effort into finding a building where Lil and Neill could base their school in England. She found a building in Lyme Regis called Summerhill and that became the permanent name of the school. Neill and Lil brought five children with them but had to take in paying guests to cover the rent. Slowly the number of pupils grew.
Neill’s book, The Problem Child was published in 1926 and was a considerable success. Further books spreading his ideas were published in many countries. The number of pupils grew. Neill decided to specialize in problem children and this included those abused, neglected, abandoned by parents.
In 1927 the couple moved their growing school to a large rambling red brick building set in thickly grown greenery and where swings and cabins were built into boughs of the enormous trees. This was in Suffolk. They began to get more pupils and became well known as an experimental school. It was immensely hard work for Lil who, as housemistress and matron was responsible for every practical aspect of running the school as well as teaching. Neill too worked hard but in a more fluid way than Lil. When I interviewed some of the people who had been students at Summerhill they talked with huge affection of Lil’s warmth and commitment to their happiness as well as her being the mover and shaker who ensured that everything worked to plan. Neill, too, acknowledged that the school would probably not have succeeded without Lil’s determination and prodigious work.
Our partnerhip was an ideal one. She was a practical person, whereas I couldn’t organise a squad of Boy Scouts. She carried the school in her mind so to say; knew what each pupil paid and what each lagging parent owed. Sometimes she was angry when people didn’t pay up , but again and agin the situation arose where the parent sof a child could no longer afford the fees, and she was alwayus the first to cry:”of course your child must remain at Summerhill , and you can begin paying when you are better off.
Gustav Mattson who spent a couple of weeks in Hellerau at the school, voiced the sentiment of many future pupils including Michael Bolton who became prime dancer with the British Royal Ballet Company:
Frau Doctor was a most remarkable woman, almost like a mother to most of us, without any favourites but with a good understanding – Neill’s great support and indefatigable co-operator. I don’t think he could have carried through his enormous task without her.
Lil taught classes in German, shorthand and geography, and evidently she was a good teacher, as Neill wryly describes in an anecdote about how nobody turned up for his math’s lessons, but Lil always had a full house. Lil also taught piano to the children and filled the school with her own playing as she sat at the well-worn upright piano, hands skimming over the keys, her head lifting up with a smile that urged children to sing along.
I interviewed a number of people who had been at Summerhill when my grandmother was there and she was described as warm gregarious, cultured unflappable, immensely patient. She was very maternal with the childen and took their problems seriously. Elisabeth Pascall, one of the earliest pupils talked of her joy at waking up every day feeling happy about the day ahead. Hyda Sims who spent her childhood there told me
Summerhill was the most important five years of my life as close to the bone as who your mother and father were, having a round face and being a girl. At Summerhill I created my view of myself and the world, and it has been my yardstick.
The writer Henry Miller said, know of no educator in the Western world who can compare to A S Neill . He stands alone. Summerhill is a tiny ray of light in a world of darkness. Its aim is to create happy, contented people, not cultural misfits dedicated to war, insanity and canned knowledge.
Then the Second World War came. The school had to relocate to Ffestiniog in Wales because Leiston, by the coast, was too dangerous but the Welsh school building was a leaky ramshackle place and there was incessant rain as well as national rationing to contend with. When Henry visited she found Lil a “complete nervous wreck” by summer 1941.
Henry was still living in Lyme Regis with George and Olga, a much younger woman she had befriended and helped through severe mental illness and who would remain a companion after George died in 1933. This was a time of enormous grief for Henry and took comfort from seances organised for her where she was convinced she communicated with George.
It was at just this time that Lil, ten years older than Neill, learned that he was having an affair with a younger woman and wanted to leave Lil. But he stayed to keep their school going. Lil was utterly shattered and became more and more disconnected from Summerhill, spending her time climbing the craggy mountains behind the school talking to herself in a rambling incoherent way. She descended into a full blown breakdown and her son Walter when he visited was the only person she wanted.
Neill wrote to his friend, Wilhelm Reich : ‘My wife is done out now, It is very sad to see one who has been so active, become like a child again.’ His memorial tribute in the book Hearts Not Heads in a School recognised how valuable Lil had been ‘Her memorial will be lived in the lives of many… who were helped by her… encouraged by her… loved by her.’
Lil was put into a mental hospital She died in Wales in 1944 and she was buried in an unmarked grave. My brother and I visited the cemetery some years back imagining we might sense her presence, but we could not locate where our grandmother was.
Henry meanwhile had published her last book, The Young Cosima but it was not well received and that was hard to take. Then she contracted colon cancer and was nursed by Olga until she died in 1946. Her ashes were scattered in the sea at Hastings along with George’s.
It is a sad ending to the story of two such important pioneering women for whom education in different ways was so vital to who they were and what they did.
[Editorial note: In 2019 Graeme Charles, an Australian member of the HHR Society did some preliminary research before a group from the Society visited Wales. With the help of a cemetery official Graeme was successful in locating the previously unmarked grave. A small cross with a plaque was erected and Lil’s grave honoured by members of the Society. You can read more about this in the HHR Society newsletter for April 2020.]