But was Wells paying Richardson a great compliment? The genre of school stories is maligned and rarely considered as literature.
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The once unruly or misunderstood girl caps off her first year with a victory for the school in a tennis tournament, or by acing her exams. Laura learns little from her own mistreatment at the hands of others.
Her crimes are many. Her punishments are few.
While Laura is ostracised after her most flamboyant lie, there are no lingering consequences for her deceptions. Girls of the period were socialised into traditional feminine expectations of marriage and motherhood.
But, as critic Sally Mitchell shows in her book The New Girl , some Victorian and Edwardian fiction presents girlhood as a liminal state that brings with it freedom from gendered restrictions. There are many things that a girl can get away with without being seen as unfeminine that a woman cannot.
The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson - Free Ebook
Laura subsequently hurls the despised apple out of a train carriage toward a telegraph post. Likewise, her lack of interest in boys a not represented as a failing. Beresford even gives us a freeze-frame close-up of Laura with over-bite begging for acceptance. He isn't interested in presenting these girls as beautiful or sensuous, and deliberately shows their facial pimples and awkward bodies.
Even the suggestion of lesbianism in Laura's relationships with 2 girls are diffused by making one fat and expelled for stealing from the others to buy a ring for Laura , and the other a rich older student, who cradles Laura in bed like a mother. The female staff are also grotesques - Sheila Helpmann as the schoolmistress wears an unwavering look of disdain, though when she drops it at Laura's graduation, we get a laugh, and Beresford undercuts the sight of floating black swans that Laura feeds by having them bleet loudly.
The film works the best with Beresford's use of Laura's piano playing, when he edits to his comic routines, but he unfortunately indulges Barry Humphries as the school's minister in a long monologue where he denounces the thieving friend. Start your free trial.
The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson
Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Oscar-nominated director Bruce Beresford Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies crafts a tender coming-of-age tale that introduces one of Australian literature's most beloved characters to Eleanor Witcombe screenplay , Henry Handel Richardson from the novel by.
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The Getting of Wisdom
Learn more More Like This. The Balloon Goes Up. Cecilia of the Pink Roses The Fringe Dwellers On Dangerous Ground The Balloon Goes Up Edit Cast Cast overview, first billed only: A musical theme runs through the story, with piano works by Beethoven , Schubert and Thalberg played by Sarah Grunstein.
Laura Rambotham is sent to attend boarding school in Melbourne at the turn of the century. During her second year she tells everyone about a made-up romance between herself and the school's minister, Reverend Shepherd.
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She forms an attachment with an older girl, Evelyn. When Evelyn leaves, Laura throws herself into her studies and wins the school literary and music prizes.
Grundy said he would think about it if Beresford made a McKenzie sequel.