The Getting of Wisdom

The Getting of Wisdom / Henry Handel Richardson
Read by Justine Eyre
Ashland, OR: Blackstone Audio, 2018, c1910.

Now moving back a century to visit the schooldays of Laura Rambotham, in this Australian classic. Laura is the eldest in her family, living in a remote area of Australia at the beginning of the 20th century. It's time for her to be sent away to school. Now, while she is admired by her younger siblings for her storytelling and spirit, these don't serve her so well in a city school of other girls either her own age or older. 

Laura finds it difficult to settle in; she's awkward and prickly, and isn't quite sure of the right way to act in her new setting. She's from a middle class family, with a widowed mother who actually works -- she's a needlewoman making clothing for her own family and others, to support her children. Laura's fellow pupils are from wealthy families, and one of the scandals she must suffer early on is having others find out that her mother works. (And of course, having to wear the out of fashion clothing her mother made for her. Horrors!)

Trying to make a place for herself, Laura falls back on her gift for storytelling, but her 'stories' get out of hand and she's punished officially and socially for lying. She's artistic and creative, and so this structured educational system with both direct and unspoken rules is tough for her to adjust to.

She does eventually find her place -- the book covers a few years of school and holidays -- but the book is a realistic and pointed examination of the way girls were educated at that time in middle/upper class Australia. She particularly skewers the efforts of all education to keep these young women completely ignorant of anything to do with sex. The book ends with Laura and the girls she had finally befriended all finishing their education and heading out into their own life journeys. Laura leaves still uncertain about what she's going to next and what she might do in her future. It's clear that her years at school were just a way to get through some time and the 'education' there was of no use to someone clever or creative. 

The book is an important text in Australian literature, and is said to be semi-autobiographical. I liked it for its social realism and the examination of characters. Some of the other pupils have distressing things happen to them, mainly because of social norms at the time, and I think this hothouse setting highlights that society. 

However, the structure is a bit weak; I wasn't always sure how time was passing and where we were in Laura's story. It's also quite episodic, with no overarching message or narrative conclusion. It just kind of stops. There's no message to take away, it sort of fizzles out with Laura leaving this community. But I found the story readable and the setting really interesting. It has relevance to some issues of being female even today, 110 years after being published. Isn't that scary.