May 2025
Angela Neustatter, great niece of HHR on the memoir she is writing about the 2 sisters – delivered as a talk at the Lyceum Club, Melbourne in May 2025.
It is pleasing that when I come to Australia all I have to do is flash my gene pool to be treated like minor royalty. And all because my great aunt was Henry Handel Richardson who became one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors and handed down a wonderful legacy.
It was a late awakening, but when I was in my 70s with a number of books published, I found myself focusing on the two Richardson women and wondering why there was so little to be learned about Lil, Henry’s sister and my grandmother. Although there are quite a few books: biographies and critical appraisals of Henry. Lil was ever a bit part-player. I decided this wouldn’t do.
As I explored further I saw what intriguing lives both had lived. Their sibling bond had been tormenting and loving; sweet and savage; protective and empowering; and a hugely important root to the ways they developed.
So today my plan is to take elements of their lives and illustrate the ways in which Henry and Lil’s lives have been intertwined with pain and pleasure, delight and despair. which have been significant in how each lived. I also aim to make visible the strength of character and stoicism Mary Richardson and her two daughters displayed in their time.
The first excerpt from my account is an incident when the family are living in Chiltern at Lake View which illustrates Lil’s wish to be included in her sister’s life and Henry’s lifelong need to be allowed her privacy and separateness.
A six-year-old girl bounces a ball against the wall of her home. Under the tin roof around three sides of the house, the verandah is a shadowed sanctuary from the aching heat of the Australian afternoon sun. She lifts her arm and propels the ball with practiced strength, so that the rhythmic thud when it hits brick unleashes the ideas forming in her head.
The year is 1876 and the house is Lake View, in Chiltern
When she is alone here with just the placid hum of insects in the air and an occasional bird, her head fills with words and characters who present themselves like unanticipated guests, in the stories she makes up.
The door to the verandah opens slowly, a small pudgy hand pushing against it, and there is Lilian – always called Lil – the sister of Henry who was called Ettie at his time. She is fifteen months younger, running over to where Ettie is, eager to join in playing with the ball. She tugs at her sister’s skirt so that Ettie jerks around, the ball flying from her hand. Anger flares and she pushes Lil away. The story in her head is smashed into smithereens.
Lil runs indoors tears running down her face. Ettie’s game had looked such fun and she had so wanted to join in. In no time her mother, Mary, is at the door, holding Lil in her arms and calling Ettie in a harsh, cross voice to come inside. Ettie knows what is coming: she will be ticked off for being an unkind older sister who doesn’t think for a moment about Lil’s feelings. But all she had wanted was to be on her own, with her own thoughts.
There is nothing Ettie can do. Each time this happens the belief grows that Mama prefers her second born, who emerged into the world as a creamy-skinned, plump child with blonde curls, her father’s large eyes and a winning sweetness which draws many compliments. She, Ettie, is small and dark with spidery limbs and a curved nose in the making.
I am quite sure the lifelong conflict between Ettie and her mother stems from the deeply traumatic time of Ettie’s birth. Mary was ill for two weeks and too ill to have anything to do with Ettie who was premature and weighed only three pounds. They never formed the loving bond of mother and child. Then Lil, the perfect baby, was born seventeen months later. With today’s knowledge of child psychology, we can understand the sibling fury laced through Ettie’s relationship with Lil. She strove to keep Lil intimidated, belittled and in thrall to her.
So Henry turned towards her father, Walter, who delighted in her intellect and bookishness. Then over their early growing years Walter descended into madness and was painfully absent as a father until he died a hideous death. Lil’s very public grief gave the impression she was the caring one compared to Henry’s seeming cold heartedness, which was in fact an emotional shutting down as her way of dealing with the horror of it all.
After Walter died the girls saw the iron in their mother’s soul when she learnt morse code to earn a living as post mistress, and support her girls, first in Koroit then Maldon. She saw off the men who sneered that a woman would wreck the business. She did better than her male predecessor. Mary was not a woman to boast, but she felt proud and happy at what she had achieved not just as a woman but also as a single mother. I believe this will have laid the seeds for Lil’s later involvement in women’s rights.
At this time life seemed to ease into a happy way of being. Lil was joyful playing the games Ettie created and Ettie described it as one of the happiest times in her life. It is not difficult to see how cataclysmic it must have been for Ettie to be sent away after three years to board at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, a prestigious school in East Melbourne. Ettie and Lil learned they were to be separated for the first time when both were still devastated at watching their father die so horribly. Ettie was to be wrenched from the environment where she had begun to feel safe and was closer to Lil
I do not need to reprise how unhappy Ettie was, how mocked, and how difficult it was for her to fit in. It is all there in The Getting of Wisdom, the gloriously savage, satirical novel she later wrote. But little has been said about what this abrupt separation from her sister will have caused Ettie. There was nothing for it but to bring down the portcullis on her unhappiness and imagining Lil on her own with Mary, no longer bothering about her elder sister.
In truth Lil will almost certainly have suffered greatly. For all the tough stuff in their relationship she was devoted to Ettie and dependent on her.
In the end Mary did something transformative and self-sacrificing for the sake of her girls. Both had done exceptionally well at music at PLC and she decided reluctantly to leave Australia and take her daughters to Leipzig in Germany to study music. During their time in Leipzig the sisters became very close to Elisabeth Morsbach, a talented, cultured music student. Some years later, Henry heard that Elisabeth had died in childbirth and she reacted with furious upset: What a waste! When there were so many other women in the world to do the child-bearing.
We do not know precisely when Ettie persuaded Lil that they should form a pact where both agreed they would never have children, but she remained certain throughout her life that giving birth and nurturing a child was not her wish. My grandmother, had evidently talked to my mother who wrote:
The sisters had long ago agreed that babies would not be for them.
They liked children well enough; but little screaming creatures of their own, with wobbly heads and big demands, did not appeal.
For Lil the pact became an unwelcome strait jacket. She was growing into a world where women appeared to consider having children a source of satisfaction. Lil defied the pact and went on to have a child in 1903 – my father Walter Lindesay Neustatter. While pregnant, in a moment of sibling bravado, Lil wrote to her sister, ‘If you don’t love it after all the trouble I’ve gone to, woe betide you.’ In fact, when it came to it, Ettie sacrificed a week of her writing time to go and be with her sister during the birth, holding and comforting her through the ordeal and strengthening an enduring bond. But when Lil wrote endless letters about the baby’s activities Ettie told her sister how uninterested she was, offending Lil mightily.
However, Ettie gave the enormous gift to Lil of taking on a loving parental role when Walter lived with Ettie and her husband George, during his education in London. He became devoted to them, although time was only available to him outside the hours dedicated to his aunt’s writing.
As Ettie was finishing her first novel, Maurice Guest, published in 1908, she decided she could not publish using the detested name, Ethel Florence, given to her. Ettie turned to her sister for help. Lil had been cheer-leader for Maurice Guest since her elder sibling had begun this first novel, and 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 1909 Henry began a subscription to Votes for Women and became an active supporter of the suffragette movement. She sent these publications to Lil who was very drawn to the cause and Votes for Women set alight Lil’s desire to have influence. On March 12th she joined approximately 150 women as they smashed windows of public buildings across London, and demanded to be given the vote. Henry was forbidden by George to take part because of her frail health.
This kick-started Lil’s political awakening. It began 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 Lil as feminism became central in her life.
But first she had to spend two months in prison as punishment for her crime in breaking a post office window. Here I shall read you an excerpt from what I have written about a time that was indeed a shock, after her indulgent life in Germany with her husband Otto and the time spent in London staying with Henry.
Lil cast her blue eyes, now bagged with fatigue, around the thirteen-foot by seven-foot cell. She looked at the bare stone walls, narrow bench and a bed so hard it would prove torment for the back, that was the accommodation Holloway offered convicted suffragettes. She knew that at any time the teams of cockroaches, like tiny racing cars in crustacean shells, might appear, as she had heard they so often did. Or worse, as one woman had so graphically described, she might find a cockroach floating dead in a cup of hot milk.
Lil may well have reflected wryly on how she had griped about her home in Dresden not matching up to her aesthetic standards. So, Lil, too timid to play her violin in public, too fearful to let herself fall asleep on a train, had undergone a radical change of mind-set that landed her inside.
Now with her liberty being taken, she would have a great deal of time to reflect. This she realised the moment the prison warden ushered her into a solitary cell, commanding her to be quiet and cause no trouble. The warden, a daunting figure in her heavy dark outfit with a fistful of keys dangling from her belt, had slammed the door shut and locked it emphatically. Lil would reflect later that Ethel Smyth, suffragette, firebrand and acclaimed music composer – she created the suffragette’s call-to-arms ‘March of the Women’ – had been right when she observed that one never got accustomed to the unpleasant sensation as the door was slammed and the key turned.
Henry has not written about this time in letters or other writings but we do know that she cared for her nephew Walter in her home during this time.
I grew up knowing that 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 in the 1970s as a writer, and found feminism erupting in its new form, I learned a compelling context for my grandmother and I wonder if her bloodline directed me so that I got much involved with women’s rights and wrote a book Hyenas in Petticoats which looked at how feminism played out between 1968 – 1988. Lil knew she had no choice but to get through her time inside. She would do her best to draw inspiration from the strength and stoicism her mother Mary had displayed, coping with her difficult life.
Lil and Henry spent foundational years in Leipzig and Munich studying music with the very best of tutors and learning a great deal about European culture. It was during this time both met their husbands. Henry married George Robertson, a brilliant scholar who published important academic books and treasured Henry in a heart-warming way. She loved him dearly too. For all the rumours suggesting she was by inclination and possibly by action, at heart a homosexual, there was no evidence of this. Lil married Otto, a doctor and health reformer. This was a lively and fun marriage to begin with, and both adored their son, Walter but Lil began to dislike her life in Hellerau Germany as a housebound wife and mother.
So, at a time when Lil was visiting Henry, her son Walter, who was at King Alfred School in London, brought A.S.Neill, his teacher, home to tea. Neill, finding Lil receptive stayed four hours, then followed this up with more visits, telling my grandmother his dream of running 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 – a contrast to the experience of pupils at the Scottish school where he had been a primary teacher and had loathed orders to be hard and use the tawse to hit the pupils. 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. Otto, who recognised that he and Lil being separated during the war years had emptied their relationship of chemistry, accepted this and became very attached to Neill when he and Lil found a property in Hellerau where Otto was living. They started the school in 1921 with children sent by parents who liked the idea of such a school. But as anti-Semitism became more and more fierce in the Saxony area where the school, which had some Jewish students, was based, they knew they must move.
Their move to Austria also did not work out and they had no other premises. It was then that Henry, living in Lyme Regis in Sussex, stepped in and found them a big old house to rent. It was named Summerhill. They began to get more pupils but it was immensely hard work for Lil who, as housemistress, 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 and when I interviewed some who had been students at Summerhill they talked with huge affection of Lil’s warmth and commitment to their happiness as well as being the mover and shaker who ensured that everything worked to plan. Elisabeth Pascall, one of the earliest pupils, talked of her joy at waking up every day feeling happy about the day ahead. Others who had been to authoritarian schools before said similar things. The school’s success grew, much helped by publication of Neill’s books. Neill and Lil got married and the future looked bright.
Then the Second World War came. Summerhill, now based by the coast in Suffolk had to evacuate to a ramshackle building in the Welsh hills where life became very hard with deprivation, rain and many difficult children. During this time Lil, ten years older than Neill, learned that he was having an affair with a younger woman. She had a breakdown and became more and more disconnected from Summerhill, spending her time climbing mountains and talking to herself in a rambling incoherent way. Neill was upset but unable to help her and eventually she became crazed. She was put into a mental hospital and died in Wales in 1944 where she was buried in an unmarked grave.
Henry meanwhile had been suffering from inoperable colon cancer and could not see her sister before she too died. Henry died in 1946, having been cared for by Olga Roncoroni, her companion since George’s death. Henry’s ashes were scattered along with George’s in the sea.
And now I hope very much to bring the sisters to life again by writing about the bond that held them.