Henry Kingsley | Biography

The English writer Henry Kingsley published twenty works, most of them novels. Although only a minority of Kingsley's fiction is set in Australia, they are his earliest and most important works and reflect the time he spent in Australia. He is known in Australian literature primarily for his novel The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), the first major novel to be set in Australia. Along with Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) and Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms (1888), The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn became one of the classics of nineteenth-century Australian fiction. It provides a panoramic view of the life lived by those settling the Australian bush and features a succession of set-piece scenes--a bush fire, an attack by Aborigines, a picnic in the bush, a cattle drive, and a kangaroo hunt--that subsequently figured prominently in the colonial literature of Australia. These were incidents of...
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