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Richardson, who always undervalued The Getting of Wisdom (she described it as "just a merry and saucy bit of irony," which she wrote as a diversion while working on Maurice Guest), was no better a critic of it than others who have written about it. In fact, the novel so perfectly reflects the attitudes of a child — the ephemeral crises and disasters that are so foreign to the adult perspective — that it is difficult for adults to discuss, and it is unique among Richardson's works. She "does not estimate children's behavior witht he 'teacherly' preoccupations and standards of the adult world, but estimates both the childhood world and the adult world with the preoccupations and standards of a child actually experiencing them."¹¹

"It is almost as if the clear-eyed, passionate child who was almost suffocated by educational authoritarianism sneaked out of her while her back was turned and wrote a perfect novel that the self-conscious adult had no power to understand," notes Greer in the most perceptive of all her many perceptive comments on the novel.¹²

In this sense "the getting of wisdom" is distinctly ironic, as Laura learns lessons of accommodation, submission, and suppression of spontaneity.

The novel's childlike spontaneity and honesty are among its most innovative qualities. Nettie Palmer observed:

H. H. R. had framed her work, not on conventional lines, but according to her own vision of the truth. In this it was an utterly unusual, an original book. For stories of school-life, like those of youth in general, had scarcely ever been written, at least in English-speaking countries, with even an approach to honesty. In them the emotion was misdirected to docility. They seemed to have been designed by teacherly persons, their object the concealment of the truth about the relations between young people themselves or between young people and the grown-ups who expected their obedience and took for granted their delighted co-operation in adult schemes." ¹³

Richardson's approach to the school experience, the coming of age, anticipates Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published six years later. (Joyce's associate Stuart Gilbert was a Richardson enthusiast. "There is no book previous to Ulysses that I have read so often and so often recommended as Maurice Guest," he wrote. To my mind it is the best novel written in the twenty years preceding the war.")¹⁴ For most readers today, Maurice Guest shows its age, whereas in The Getting of Wisdom, more than any of her other books, Richardson writes with a directness, simplicity, ease, and economy of means that truly usher in the twentieth century. "Every stroke is subordinated to the main design, the enactment (rather than description) of the implacable destruction of a child's innocence," Germaine Greer observes. "Maurice Guest, for all its outspokenness about sex and perversion, is a nineteenth-century novel; in The Getting of Wisdom we are suddenly aware that a tenth of the twentieth century is almost over."¹⁵

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