Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Ettie and Nettie

When Nettie Palmer visited Henry Handel Richardson
by
February 2013, no. 348

Ettie and Nettie

When Nettie Palmer visited Henry Handel Richardson
by
February 2013, no. 348

It is a brilliant summer day in July 1935. The scene is a house called Green Ridges, near Hastings, Sussex. Two women, seated but not relaxed, face each other across a formal drawing room. This is the first time they have met. Nettie Palmer, Australian writer and journalist, has come to stay overnight with the novelist Henry Handel Richardson.

As novelist and journalist they know one another’s writings well, and they have been corresponding for years. But there is tension in this first face-to-face encounter. They will never be friends, never on first-name terms. Not because of the absurdity of their matching names – Ettie and Nettie – but because Ettie, who has for years insisted on being called Henry instead of her given name Ethel or that childish diminutive Ettie, prefers to keep her distance. Today it will be Miss Richardson and Mrs Palmer, as it has been in their letters. It will take years even to adjust the greeting to ‘Dear Nettie Palmer’. It will never become ‘Dear Henry’.

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.