Such talent was incongruous in this provincial place. Henry knew music – in her youth, she had been the musical prodigy of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College, and later spent three years studying piano in Leipzig with the hope of becoming a concert performer. That dream she had had to abandon – her hands, and her gift, had proved too small – but music would always be her mainstay. As her eye rested unseeing on the screen and her ear thrilled to the young woman’s playing, Henry’s mind went to the Schumann duets on her music stand at home. Instinct told her the lovely musician, unschooled though she must be, belonged beside her on the piano stool.

Henry Handel Richardson at Lyme Regis
(photograph supplied by NLA)

When the film was over, Henry waited outside. Olga came out at last, tired, with a pile of music in her arms. Stepping from the shadow of the old stone wall, Henry asked her about one of the pieces she had played – mere popular tunes, most of them, yet the young woman had made them sound like real music. Where had she learned to play like that?

Casting shy glances at Henry from beneath her lashes, Olga explained that she had been playing since she was four years old, under her mother’s tutelage.From the age of fifteen she had played for a living, sometimes performing for up to seven hours a day. Olga was now twenty-six, but her timidity made her seem much younger.

But how had she learned to improvise? Henry wanted to know. How did she know how to modulate effortlessly from one key to another?

It came naturally, the girl confessed. As naturally as writing her own music, which was her true passion.

Delighted by her answers and her unassuming smile, Henry at once invited the young woman home to tea. But Olga, her face lively with anguish, demurred. Haltingly, she explained that she suffered from such intense anxiety that she could go out only if accompanied by one of her parents. The rebuff was so artless, and delivered with such evident regret, that Henry accepted it without comment. But she was not a person who resiled from a challenge.

The next night Henry returned, and when at last the film was over, she waited again by the wall. Surely, she suggested, overtaking the young woman, it would not tax her too much to take a short turn on the esplanade? If they stayed within view of the old Assembly Rooms where her mother and father were?

With shining eyes, Olga confessed that she could go as far as the second lamp-post. For Henry, it was enough – for now. The two women strolled along the shore in the moonlight, and when they reached the second lamp-post, stood talking while the evening grew late. Finally, Olga’s father came out to walk the dog, and with a nod of abashed curiosity, collected his daughter from the haughty stranger’s care.

Henry returned the next night, and the next. Every evening, she and Olga walked a little further, talked a little longer. At last, hardly knowing how it happened, Olga found herself entering the garden of Westfield, the small house Henry rented half a mile away. The elder woman conducted the younger into the drawing room. The piano was there, with the four-handed arrangement of Schumann’s symphonies open on the music rack. They sat down side by side. They began.

Henry Handel Richardson, 1945
(photograph by Howard and Joan Coster)

The Henry of this story is the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson, then forty-nine, who had long ago abandoned her given name, Ethel, in favour of her pen-name. The young pianist is Olga Roncoroni, the woman who would become Henry’s lifelong companion – to use the usual ambiguous designation. Although she may not have been wearing drag when Henry met her, Olga had in her late teens performed as a so-called ‘male impersonator’, in the tradition of music-hall performers like Vesta Tilley. According to Olga’s own late-life companion, Margaret Capon, the youthful Olga, singing ‘in an immaculately tailored dress-suit’, had been a hit with audiences.

By the time Henry met her, however, Olga’s career in theatre was over. She was performing only at the cinema – in addition to working in her mother’s restaurant and teaching dancing. Nevertheless, Olga was an accomplished musician, and when Henry – a successful novelist and city sophisticate, with a literature professor for a husband and a live-in housekeeper–secretary – took an interest in her, Olga was flattered and excited. In her memoir, which makes up a compelling two-thirds of Henry Handel Richardson: Some Personal Impressions (1957), Roncoroni explains that even before the older woman spoke to her, she had noticed the novelist, both at the cinema and around the town. ‘Despite her lack of height she was a figure one instantly noticed,’ Roncoroni writes, ‘perhaps because of the Dantesque profile, her darkness and pallor – and the penetrating eyes.’ When she was playing for a film, Olga ‘used to peep over the top of the screen which shielded the audience from the glare of [her] piano-light and be pleased if [she] saw [Henry] was there’. From the first, she says, Henry ‘attracted me’.

Indeed, Olga’s memoir is a love story – even a coded tale of seduction. The mysterious and aloof Henry lures the timid girl away from the safety of the cinema and the sheltering wing of her parents, and with steady resolve overcomes her doubts and fears. Although Olga’s narrative makes Henry the active agent and herself entirely passive, it is clear from the beginning both that Henry is desirable and that Olga desires her – in an entirely respectable, turn-of-the-century kind of way. It is also clear – though, again, the innocent narrator never avows it – that Henry is very early plotting to remove the young woman from her parents’ home to her own. Olga herself regarded her first visit to Westfield as a watershed. She describes herself entering the ‘walled garden’ of Henry’s home, and following her captor from there into the empty house and up to the bedroom (to witness the removal of Henry’s hat). There, as she leans from the window and inhales the ‘scent of the Madonna lilies’, Olga’s life begins. ‘Looking back, I know now that the passing through that garden gate and into Westfield that evening was as momentous for me as Alice’s opening of the little door that led into Wonderland was for her,’ she writes. ‘The old life was over; I had crossed the threshold of a new one.’ Not only that, but she has a joyful sense of ‘having achieved something very difficult and unusual’. What precisely she has achieved – besides the feat of going beyond the second lamp-post – is not entirely clear at this point. But it has been achieved, paradoxically, through an abandonment of will, a strenuous surrender of herself to another. Indeed, Olga’s pleasure in self-surrender gives her narrative its most distinct erotic charge.

On that first evening, Olga played for Henry while Henry made supper – burning the toast, as they would ever afterwards fondly remember. Later, they played Schumann together, and Olga won her hero’s praise for her sight-reading. She also met Henry’s notoriously stand-offish blue Persian, who ‘instantly accepted’ her, a vote of approval which ‘told heavily in my favour’. Olga’s account of the evening makes it into a test for her, a kind of audition, which she passed with flying colours. As a result, she was now to be admitted to her idol’s life. The only remaining obstacles were Olga’s anxiety – a condition that to a modern eye looks like agoraphobia – and her mother. Henry at once set about liberating Olga from both.

Henry Handel Richardson and Olga Roncoroni, Newquay, 1934 (photograph supplied by the Monash University Richardson Project)

According to Olga, before the end of the year Henry brought her news of a Freudian clinic that had opened in London where she could get treatment for her anxiety. But in the meantime there had been a complication. Until her meeting with Henry, Olga’s ‘nervous disorder’ had centred on her mother. As long as her mother was present, Olga could function normally; without her,she could do nothing. Butthe summer she had spent with Henry had effected a neat and complete transferral of her attachment. As Olga puts it, her ‘dependence on [her] mother had completely vanished’, and her ‘fear and need had transferred themselves’ to Henry. Olga’s mother, far from being grateful for the liberation this offered her, was disconcerted and suspicious. She ‘grew jealous’ of Henry, fearing that Henry ‘was out to lure [her daughter] away from her’.

In Olga’s version of the tale, she becomes the prize in a covert battle between two powerful women. The outcome, however, was never in doubt. Henry, Olga writes, with disconcerting naïveté, was always the better option,offering her ‘both mental and physical advantages unobtainable in my home’. How could her hard-worked, provincial mother hope to compete with an accomplished sophisticate like Henry? Besides, while Olga was ‘very fond’ of her mother, her feelings for Henry were of another order altogether. Under cover of her ‘illness’, Olga is able to confess to passionate feelings that might otherwise have been – at least in 1957, when her memoir was published – unseemly. Certainly, these feelings look strikingly like the condition generally known as falling in love. Olga writes that she spent every moment she could with her new friend, and when Henry returned to London at the end of the summer, ‘[h]er going seemed like the end of everything worth while in my life’. The three months of her absence ‘were a nightmare’. This, Olga explains, is because of her neurosis – it has nothing to do with love. Her sense that she cannot live without Henry is simply a new manifestation of a long-standing psychiatric illness.

This is how she presents it to Henry – according to her account, at least – when she finally confesses. Under cover of explaining the ‘changed form my fears had taken’, she is able to tell Henry that life without her is a misery and that only in the beloved woman’s presence can she be happy. Henry – not surprisingly, perhaps – takes the confession in good part. ‘With her extraordinary ability to put herself in another person’s place and realize what their feelings were, she saw at once how desperate my plight had been, and met my confession with sympathy and understanding,’ Olga writes. Henry, we are given to understand, was not the woman to separate a poor, sick girl from the object of her neurotic attachment. They decided to keep the revelation – of Olga’s transferral of love-object/declaration of love – from Olga’s mother and to expedite their plans to get Olga into treatment in London. Once Olga was in the English capital, the move from her mother’s house to Henry’s was easily accomplished. Early in 1921, Olga writes, she became ‘a member of [Richardson’s] household, and from then on never left it’.

At this point in Olga’s narrative, the story of her psychiatric illness and the Freudian treatment she undertook for at least a year in London fades into the background, having served its purpose. Yet a certain confusion remains. Throughout her memoir, Olga clearly and repeatedly links her neurotic fears to her passion for Henry, which would suggest that curing the one would cure the other. But though her therapy was deemed a success – Olga was soon able to leave the house alone and to travel by public transport, and went on to undertake a formal course of study and work full-time as a teacher for many years – her feelings for Henry did not change. If anything, her dependence on – or, more neutrally, her emotional involvement with – Henryonly intensified.

As for Henry herself, her passion for Olga seems never to have faltered. When Olga first moved to London, the young woman lived at the clinic where she was receiving treatment, and Henry ‘came almost every day to take [her] out’. When, after three months, she moved in with Henry and her husband, Henry herself took Olga to her daily therapy sessions – a journey of an hour each way by bus. This was, Olga comments, a serious disruption to Henry’s own rigid schedule, and a great inconvenience – and Henry was not given to inconveniencing herself for others. Years later, Olga asked her why she had done it: ‘She replied that she felt she had done little to help others during her life, and she looked upon my case as something given her to do in order to make good this omission.’ Such a pious (and frankly implausible) answer neatly elides the obvious one: that Henry was entirely besotted with Olga and wanted to spend every moment she could in her presence. Besides, Henry was interested in Freudian therapy. She had already asked Olga to make a transcript of each therapy session for her. She told Olga she might want to draw on the transcripts someday in a novel, but it seems just as likely that, perhaps unconsciously, she sought to ‘supervise’ the therapy, in order to make sure that whatever else Olga was cured of, she would not recover from her desire for Henry herself.

Whatever Henry’s motives, this was the beginning of a lifelong, daily intimacy. Olga would not live apart from Henry again until Henry’s death in 1946. Her place in the household can be difficult to understand, especially in the age of the nuclear family. Henry shared her London house with her husband, John George Robertson (known as George), and, periodically, her sister Lil and her sister’s son, Walter, who lived with his aunt and uncle throughout his school years and subsequent medical training. Also in residence were Henry’s housekeeper and secretary, Irene Stumpp, a close friend of Henry’s who had come with her from Germany, and three maids. All of these people had a clear relationship to Henry. Olga, however, was neither a relative nor an employee. She was simply Henry’s friend. Over time, she would take on numerous informal roles in the household, notably those of chauffeur and travelling companion. In extremis, she would also act as secretary, housekeeper, and nurse. But for the first twelve years of her life with Henry – until George’s death in 1933 – she had a full and busy life of her own. Once her therapy was over, she completed a three-year program in Dalcroze Eurhythmics in two years, and went on to teach at a London girls school and give evening classes to local teachers, as well as composing music for use in eurhythmics. Olga was in no way an appendage to or dependant of the household. She was there solely because Henry wanted her.

But what exactly was their relationship? According to Olga’s account, the two women took a long walk together every afternoon and spent evenings reading poetry, playing duets on the piano, or going to the theatre or a concert. At Lyme Regis, where they went every summer and some winters, they swam and played tennis together, in addition to their daily walks. They also travelled overseas together, at first with George but later alone. According to Olga, while Henry ‘loved travelling’, George ‘did not’, and so ‘he gladly handed over to me the post of travelling-companion to H.H.’. Even when the three of them travelled together, it was Olga who shared a room with Henry. As she explains in relation to a winter cruise they took to the West Indies in 1930, George took the single cabin, leaving Henry and Olga the double, because he was an early riser and wanted ‘to avoid disturbing H.H.’.

George Robertson and Henry Handel Richardson
(photograph by Olga Roncoroni [NLA])

Apart from such asides, George barely figures in Olga’s account of her life with Henry. She does take care to establish that her relationship with Henry had George’s blessing, even claiming (improbably) that George actually instigated Henry’s relationship with Olga in the first place. Henry had apparently told George that she was ‘bored’ and ‘lonely’ in Lyme Regis without him, and he responded: ‘Why don’t you ask the girl at the cinema to tea? She might prove more entertaining than some of the people you’ve tried.’ Olga quotes George’s exact words, for added authenticity. Similarly, she authorises her continuing relationship with Henry after George’s death by including a deathbed scene in which George asks Olga to ‘stay with and look after Henry when I am gone’. Once again, his exact words are quoted. Needless to say, Olga gave George ‘the assurance for which he asked’.

Except for such strategic invocations, George is mere background in Olga’s memoir. Henry’s marriage was undoubtedly warm and loving, but by the time Olga came into her life it had become somewhat formal. In his memoir of Henry, Walter Neustatter’s description of the ‘strict routine’ that governed his aunt’s household makes it clear that Henry and her husband had separate bedrooms. ‘In the evenings we all sat in our own rooms until bedtime, when oddly enough my uncle and I assembled in my aunt’s bedroom when she had reached the dressing-gown stage and was attending to her face and hair,’ he writes. ‘There she would make enquiries about the day’s doings, and was always keenly interested in what had gone on.’ Henry herself writes of lying in bed on evenings when George was out listening for the click of the gate that would signal his safe return, and ‘the creak of the wooden stair outside my bedroom, as he passed to his own’. Henry and George had little interaction during the day. George worked at home in the early mornings and then went to work, while Henry’s morning writing time was sacrosanct. Her free time she spent with Olga, who drove Henry to her psychical research meetings, went out walking and shopping with her, and faced with her the exigencies of daily life. By contrast, Henry’s relationship with George seems to have existed on a more abstract plane. Neustatter – like everyone who writes about George Robertson – describes his uncle as calm, kind, and selfless, not only in his relations with Henry but more generally. Henry, however, was known for her tempests. ‘She could be very difficult towards those she lived with,’ Neustatter writes. ‘At times she would goad them on to a state of hysterical desperation, and then calm them down with an equal display of charm.’ But such behaviour was reserved largely for the women of the household. ‘Her relations with my uncle, a very quiet, kindly, and highly erudite Scotsman, were always excellent,’ Neustatter notes.

By contrast, Henry’s relations with Olga were tempestuous. In her memoir, Olga has a tendency to depict herself as Henry’s devoted slave, outdoing herself in masochistic self-sacrifice to ensure her idol is always safe, warm, comfortable, and well. But the impression that she lived in a permanent state of abjection is misleading. She also describes a number of knock-down, drag-out fights between her and Henry, such as the one they had on the docks at Boulogne, when Olga first crossed the Channel. In the bustle the two women lost sight of each other, and when they found one another, ‘Instead of falling on one another’s necks with joyful exclamations, H.H. and I proceeded to have one of the worst rows we ever indulged in, protests and accusations rattling off at machine-gun speed.’ Later, safely on the train, ‘we roared with laughter at the memory of the open-mouthed horror on the face of [their porter] while we had verbally torn one another to pieces.’

Then there is the wartime incident of the knitting bag containing Henry’s current manuscript and other precious objects. At this point, Henry and Olga were living at Green Ridges in Fairlight, Sussex, within sight of the sea and directly in the path of the German bombers. Henry was sleeping in the hall, because it was deemed to be safer than her bedroom, and Olga slept close by in the drawing room. When the air-raid siren sounded, it was Olga’s job to grab the knitting bag, which Henry kept by her bed, as the two of them ran for the bomb shelter in the garden. On this particular night, as the planes thrummed overhead, Olga couldn’t find the bag, and Henry ‘became furious’ with her and let loose. ‘Feeling myself the injured party, I retaliated, and we had one of our fiercest rows, both of us having by now completely forgotten all outside dangers,’ Olga writes. ‘As we stood there, clad only in pyjamas, the kitchen door opened, and Ann [their servant] emerged, fully dressed, and said in a calm, fatalistic tone: “I think the roof has gone!’” They had been so engrossed in their argument that neither had noticed two bombs exploding in the field just beyond their house. Such moments ring true, and present a very different Henry from the cold and aloof woman she often appeared to be. They reveal a person fierce and difficult, with a flaring temper – but also one capable of ‘roaring with laughter’ when a contretemps was over. Olga’s Henry has a mischievous sense of fun. Another of her stories from the war years depicts Henry, Olga, and Ann, interrupted at table by an air raid, carrying their dinner plates into the garden shelter singing their ‘theme song’: ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.’ And then there is the story of how she and Olga, caught by a daytime raid, would take shelter in the narrow space between the two doors – the second was installed for sound-proofing – of Henry’s study. Henry, Olga explains, ‘was slim enough to fit into it without the sound-proof door shooting open (it was held by a spring-button only)’, but Olga could only manage if she held her breath. ‘When the peak danger-moment arrived, H.H. would command me to cease breathing, which usually had the effect of making me laugh, and out would shoot the green door,’ Olga writes. ‘These episodes caused H.H. much amusement.’

The intimacy of this image of the two women sheltering together in this tiny space, and their evident easy familiarity with one another’s bodies, speaks volumes about the closeness of their relationship. The suggestion of ongoing joking and teasing between them – especially amid such grim circumstances – is also evocative. This silly, playful side of Henry tends to be submerged in depictions of her relationship with George, who is treated by Richardson’s critics and biographers with ponderous respect. Clearly, the two relationships drew out different aspects of Henry’s personality. Yet because her marriage is generally taken to be her primary relationship, the face she showed with Olga is often occluded.

The primacy accorded to Henry’s marriage is not surprising. In biographical terms, a marriage generally trumps other relationships. It is a formal, legal relation, after all, and everybody knows – in theory, at least – what it entails. As well, it is a heterosexual relationship, and such relationships have, until recently, been considered the basis of society. Besides, as Vicky Bertram notes, sexual relationships are almost always regarded (wrongly, she argues) as being of more significance than non-sexual ones, however close. Given this, Henry’s uncategorisable relationship with Olga was always likely to be doomed to relative insignificance. A relationship between two women, no matter how central it was to them both, is always regarded as secondary to a marriage. Yet the evidence suggests that Henry’s connection with Olga was a powerful emotional and erotic attachment with at least as much importance in her life as her marriage.

Richardson’s critics and biographers have pondered – in the absence of explicit evidence – whether the relationship was specifically sexual. Writing in 1986, Dorothy Green concludes that it probably wasn’t, though her grounds for this conclusion are somewhat circuitous. She acknowledges the homoerotic dimension of Henry’s fiction, but counters this by pointing out that Richardson’s novels also deal with heterosexual relationships, and that a heterosexual marriage is at the centre of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29), which Green considers Richardson’s greatest work. In relation to the evidence that after George’s death, Henry often shared a room, and at times a bed with Olga, she explains that ‘when she was grieving, lonely, and then desperately ill, it comforted her to have her friend near her during the night’. The decisive factor for her, however, is that Henry was devoted to her husband. Her assumption – very much of its time – seems to be that a satisfying heterosexual relationship must necessarily preclude a satisfying homosexual one. In his 2004 biography of Richardson, Michael Ackland comes to a similar conclusion, writing that ‘much speaks against a sexual relationship’ between Henry and Olga. He notes that though Richardson had certainly experienced ‘same-sex bonding’ in adolescence, she had gone on to develop ‘more conventional relationships’: ‘Although Henry confessed to a certain awkwardness in her dealings with men in Leipzig, for decades her marriage with George was particularly close and loving.’

The idea here seems to be that a person can have only one sexual orientation, and only one significant love relationship. This was not Richardson’s own view. In her account of her early life, Myself When Young (1948), Richardson gives equal emphasis to what she identifies as her first two loves: her infatuation as a twelve-year-old with a handsome curate, Jack Stretch, and her passion as a teenager for a beautiful schoolfellow, Connie Cochrane. Noting that the relationship between Laura and Evelyn in The Getting of Wisdom (1910) is a fictional version of her own relationship with Connie, she stresses that far from exaggerating her feelings in the novel, she actually watered them down. The ‘real thing’, she writes, ‘stirred me to my depths, rousing feelings I hadn’t known I possessed, and leaving behind it a heartache as cruel as my first.’ She goes on to explicitly dispute the conventional idea that schoolgirl crushes are a mere substitute for the heterosexual loves that will inevitably follow: ‘Some may see in my infatuation merely an overflow of feelings that had been denied a normal outlet. But there was more in it than that. The attraction this girl had for me was so strong that few others have surpassed it.’ In other words, she insists on the valency of the relationship. Her feelings cannot be dismissed as the mere temporary perversion of a young girl’s natural heterosexual lust. Her attraction to Connie was no substitute, but the ‘real thing’ – a genuine love affair in its own right.

This was an unconventional view for the 1940s, when Richardson was writing. As Lillian Faderman points out in her classic study, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981), by the 1900s the sexologists had done their work in turning female homosexuality into a perversion and a disease. From the end of World War I, she writes, ‘openly expressed love between women for the most part ceased to be possible’. It had acquired an ‘outlaw status’, which meant that it had to be either hidden or suppressed. Women themselves, she goes on, internalised these negative views of same-sex love, so that even those who were avowedly lesbian were ‘full of self-doubts and self-loathing’. This might explain the care Olga takes in her writing to avoid any implication that her relationship with Henry was sexual. Yet Henry herself seems relatively indifferent to such imputations. Certainly in her novels, she depicts both homosexual and heterosexual loves with relative dispassion. Maurice Guest (1908), which centres on a number of torrid love affairs, includes a bisexual male character of glinting amorality. In addition, Richardson has said that she based the central character, Maurice Guest, on herself, and his lover, Louise Dufrayer, on the actress Eleonora Duse, with whom Richardson was openly and frantically infatuated for some years, although she never met her idol in person. (Incidentally, Olga writes that when she read Maurice Guest soon after meeting Henry, it had a ‘terrific’ impact on her ‘untutored mind’: ‘But, though I was shaken by it, the book intrigued me and, ignorant as I was, I was conscious of its power.’)

Henry Handel Richardson and Olga Roncoroni at Lyme Regis
(National Library of Australia)

The Getting of Wisdom deals explicitly with what Richardson dubs ‘girlish intimacies’, which at that time, she writes, girls could ‘indulge . . . as they chose’. In addition, Richardson wrote a series of stories about girls in which she characterised the emergence of sexuality as interchangeably hetero- and homosexual. In these stories, girls are attracted to both women and men. One of these stories, ‘Two Hanged Women’, explicitly asserts the emotional primacy of a homosexual relationship over a heterosexual one. In it, a young woman expresses repugnance at the prospect of heterosexual sex, and flings herself into the arms of an older woman. But what is perhaps most striking about this story – published in 1934 – is its clear-sighted depiction of the social pressure on women to marry, and of the extraordinary strength and independence of mind a woman needed if she was to acknowledge socially the central place of another woman in her life.

This story shows unequivocally that Richardson knew how her society viewed lesbian relationships – yet she had seemingly no inclination to hide her own homoerotic leanings. Again and again, her fiction suggests that she did not distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual love: whether the object of one’s passion was of the same or of a different sex, love was always an overwhelming, ecstatic, and devastating experience. Not only that, but such passions were beyond one’s control. As Maurice Guest reflects, ‘His feelings were not to be put on and off, like clothes. He had no power over them. It was simply a case of accepting things as they were.’ Similarly, in Richardon’s last novel, The Young Cosima (1939), Richard Wagner tells Cosima von Bulow, his married mistress, that love is a ‘force of nature’: ‘One doesn’t excuse oneself for being swept away by a torrent, or caught up in a hurricane!’ Love, for Richardson, was something one had neither to apologise for nor explain. In this, Richardson seems to have been rather more radical than her critics and biographers. She did not seem to feel a need to account for Olga’s presence in her life. And whether the relationship was sexual or not, it seems clear that Henry loved Olga (and Olga, Henry) in a way that Faderman, at least, would classify as lesbian. Faderman argues that genital sexual activity is not the most important marker of lesbian relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, we should look for women’s ‘intense emotional and erotic (i.e. sensual) attachments to each other’. Whether women who loved one another had sex was, she writes, ‘the result of external as well as internal forces’, such as whether genital sexual activity between women had been culturally demonised, as it was in the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. Faderman proposes that historically, ‘the most significant definers of lesbian relationships have been commitment, intense emotional exchanges, and erotic exchanges that can be but are not necessarily genital’.

These characteristics seem to have been present in Henry and Olga’s relationship. This is worth stating, not to denigrate Henry’s marriage but rather to enrich our understanding of her life, personality, and writing. It seems clear that, for Henry, it was perfectly possible for a woman to be in love with both a man and a woman. Her relationship with Olga should not be seen as detracting from her relationship with George – each had its own authenticity, and its own complexities. But it should be given its place as a relationship of at least equal significance to her marriage. Biographical studies of Richardson have tended to be dismissive of Olga, as Green pointed out as early as 1986. In an age when female homosexuality was regarded as a ‘perversion’, it is understandable that critics might have sought to shield Richardson from any such imputation. But very often, this seems to have been at the cost not only of a nuanced depiction of Richardson’s relationship with Olga but also of the younger woman’s own dignity and credibility. In his memoir, Walter Neustatter – who reportedly did not like Olga – wrote that Henry elicited ‘an almost doglike devotion in some of those who worked for her’. Although Olga never worked for Henry, it seems clear that Neustatter was thinking of her. She seems to have been regarded by many who knew Henry and her husband as a kind of idiosyncratic servant, and this view communicated itself to Richardson scholars. Yet Olga’s relationship with Henry revolved not around the services she performed for the older woman – nor those Henry performed for Olga, for that matter – but around shared interests and mutual experiences, ranging from music and poetry to dancing, swimming, and touring. Olga may have presented a modest and unassuming face to the world, but she was an accomplished musician, teacher, and composer. Margaret Capon, who met Olga in 1956 when she was in her late fifties, described her as ‘a brilliant person, witty, vital and entertaining’. All too often, this sense of Olga as an attractive person – one who effortlessly drew the fastidious Henry to her – seems to be lost.

Paradoxically, Olga’s own memoir has played its part in her denigration. She often depicts herself in what Green calls a ‘sycophantic relationship’ to Richardson – as the handmaiden to genius. The strength of Olga’s self-effacement in her account of her life with Henry is such that even in 2004 Ackland could describe the relationship as ‘initially one-sided’ – with the feeling being all on Olga’s side. But such a reading overlooks Olga’s tale of Henry’s dogged pursuit of her – and the implicit eroticism in her surrender to the older woman’s will. It also fails to note the freedom, life, and laughter in Olga’s anecdotes of her life with Henry, marks of deep trust and mutual passion. Perhaps it also falls into the trap of considering Henry to be, in truth, the Romantic genius Olga tends to paint her as, the great artist who received the homage of others as her due. Yet Henry was not the lofty and aloof person she sometimes appeared to be. She was a woman of ‘flagrant emotions’, as she puts it in Myself When Young. She was a woman on first-name terms with desire.

There is an odd, sad coda to the story of Olga and Henry, told not by Olga herself but by her friend Capon. When Olga first met Henry, she had suffered from disabling anxiety, but following her treatment she had seemed to be free of this malady. In the twenty-six years she lived with Henry, Olga seems never to have experienced any episodes of mental illness. But very soon after Henry’s death she had a breakdown and was hospitalised. It had been a spectacularly difficult time for her. She and Henry had endured the ongoing stress of the bombing runs throughout the war in addition to ordinary wartime privations, and when Henry became seriously ill with colon cancer Olga became her nurse. Olga herself was suffering from a gynaecological condition which caused haemorrhaging, and had to have an operation (unspecified in both her and Capon’s accounts, but presumably a hysterectomy).

Then there was the loss of Henry herself, which Olga had deeply dreaded. (Henry seems to have felt the same way; she apparently told Olga that she wished she could take Olga with her when she died. Instead, she left Olga her estate.) So perhaps a breakdown was only to be expected. Olga got out of hospital ‘a few months later’, found herself a flat, and returned to teaching. But six months on, she had another breakdown and was again hospitalised. According to Capon, for the rest of her long life Olga spent ‘some six months of every year in a state of severe depression’. She was repeatedly hospitalised, given various medications, and subjected to ECT. None of the treatments worked, and she eventually moved into residential care, where she died at the age of eighty-nine. Although she did manage to make a life for herself in her intervals of health – her friendship with Capon, with whom she lived for a time, is evidence of this – it seems that her conviction, at the age of twenty-six, that she could not live without Henry was not entirely wrong.