BOOK REVIEW : A Child’s Ability to Live Deeply in Present : THE GETTING OF WISDOM, <i> by Henry Handel Richardson</i> , Mercury House $25<i> ,</i> 233 <i> pages</i>

Laura, a 12-year-old revered by friends and siblings for her ability to faint, has decided to end a spat with her widowed mother by assembling a bouquet of garden flowers.

Proud of her ability not only to faint but to amaze her peers with provocative gestures, Laura ties up the flowers with “the longest and most spiral” of her dark curls and heaves the bouquet through the window. Although the peace offering hits Laura’s mother in the head rather than landing, as hoped, in her lap, it is received in the proper spirit . . . until Mother spies the severed lock. Battle rages anew, whereupon Laura retreats to her room, angry and embarrassed, yet consoled by the thought that “after all, there was something rather pleasant in knowing that you were misunderstood.”

H.G. Wells, we learn in the editor’s note to this long-awaited new edition, called Laura “a most adorable little beast” in a letter to the author after reading the book at its initial publication in 1910. Wells’ description is a bit harsh, however, for Laura Tweedle Rambotham is in fact a charming girl, wonderfully typical in her child’s view of the world but, at the same time, by no means ordinary.

One could describe “The Getting of Wisdom” as a coming-of-age novel except for the fact that Henry Handel Richardson--a pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, who chose a male pen name in order to confound sexual stereotypes--seems solidly in favor of immaturity. Richardson revels in the free spirits of youth, burlesques the accommodations of experience: True wisdom, here, lies not in knowledge but in getting around what passes for knowledge in adult circles.

“The Getting of Wisdom”--which may be best known in this country for the 1977 screen version directed by Bruce Beresford--takes place primarily at Ladies’ College, a girls’ boarding school in Melbourne, Australia. Laura, the eldest of four children, has been sent there because she’s too much for her mother to handle; private school will “knock all the nonsense out of ‘er,” according to the family housekeeper (who also says, with inscrutable folk logic, that Laura is “like peas. Ye’ve got to get ‘em outer the pod”).

The real nonsense, of course, is more readily apparent in the school itself, which is run by stern disciplinarians intent, above all, in filling young heads with dull, dry, unyielding facts. Laura’s easy spontaneity--saying during lessons that the word “eleemosynary” (meaning charitable) brings to mind the color gray-blue, playing a popular tune on the school piano rather than a classical work--scandalizes both her classmates and elders, marking Laura as an unruly colt in need of breaking in.

More difficult on Laura than the hard-eyed teachers, however, are her fellow students and their fastidious cliques. An outsider, Laura must find a way to make herself part of some group, which she eventually manages--after a few false starts--by means of an elaborate lie involving the school curate, Mr. Shepherd. Laura, as influenced by biology and peer pressure as any adolescent, “gradually worked herself up into an attack of love” for the handsome, married curate, and becomes something of a school celebrity when unexpectedly invited to spend a holiday at his home. Laura, in truth, is bored to tears by the visit, but unable to disappoint her new friends, she speaks of love, assignations and a kiss stolen in the vestry.

Laura’s classmates inevitably discover the tale is complete fiction, with the result that her standing in class plummets even faster than it had so recently risen. Laura isn’t disciplined, however, because the adults never hear a word about her fabrication--fittingly, for much of the charm of “The Getting of Wisdom” lies in the contrast between the adults’ drab lives and the rich, imaginative, capricious lives of their charges. What Richardson captures beautifully in this novel is the child’s ability to live deeply in the present moment, regarding every event in her life as important and incapable of believing anything to be ephemeral.