Introduction

By the time The Getting of Wisdom was published in 1910, the era of New Woman fiction had passed. The age of modernity had begun, and as Gail Cunningham notes, ‘The word “Victorian” itself became, with remarkable rapidity, a synonym for stuffy puritanism, outmoded propriety’ (154). However, while the impact of the New Woman heroines had some lasting effect on the fictional representation of women, it was limited. The sexuality of women continued to be explored in the new century, but any vocation other than romance seemed to be overlooked: ‘The new type of heroine was, then, sexually aware but domestically inclined’ (Cunningham 155). The debate about women occurred less in fiction and more in tracts and on political platforms, and became more concentrated on the question of women's suffrage than any other issue. When Henry Handel Richardson chose to write an account of one girl's schooling in the colonial city of Melbourne, she did so when such a topic was no longer in vogue. However, her relative distance from the height of the debates gave her an analytical clarity which most of the fiction of the 1890s lacked. Richardson's apparently cool and ironic treatment of her subject does not make it any less political than the more emotional outpourings of earlier writers. If anything, its considered and subtle nature enhances its political impact.