Dorothy Richardson

The title Pilgrimage alludes not only to "the journey of the artist.. To self-realisation but, more practically, to the discovery of a unique creative form and expression".

• Name — Dorothy Richardson • Born — 17 May 1873 • Birthplace — Abingdon, England • Died — 17 June 1957 • Place of death — Beckenham, Kent, England • Resting Place — Beckenham • Occupation — Novelist and journalist • Movement — Modernism • Genre — Novel • Notable Works — Pilgrimage • Spouse — Alan Odle

Richardson was born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in 1873, the third of four daughters. After the fourth daughter was born her father (Charles) began referring to Dorothy as his son. Richardson "also attributed this habit to her own boylike willfulness". She lived at 'Whitefield' a large mansion type house on Albert Park (built by her father in 1871 and now owned by Abingdon School. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. In London she "attended a progressive school influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin", and where "the pupils were encouraged to think for themselves". Here she "studied French, German, literature, logic and psychology". At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Hanover, Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893. • Illustration — H. G. Wells, "Hypo Wilson" in Pilgrimage, in 1907 at his house in Sandgate, Kent, which Richardson often visited. Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to an attic room, 7 Endsleigh Street, Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. In 1904 she took a holiday in the Bernese Oberland, financed by one of the dentists, which was the source for her novel Oberland. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. Wells was married to a former schoolmate of Richardson's. On leave from work she stayed in Pevensey, Sussex and went to Switzerland for the winter. Then she resigned from her Harley Street job and left London "to spend the next few years in Sussex... on a farm run by a Quaker family". Richardson's interest in the Quakers led to her writing The Quakers Past and Present and editing an anthology Gleanings from the Works of George Fox, which were both published in 1914. She spent much of 1912 in Cornwall, and then in 1913 rented a room in St John's Wood, London, though she also lived in Cornwall. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, and as well she translated during her life eight books into English from French and German. The subjects of Richardson's book reviews and early essays range "for Whitman and Nietzsche to French philosophy and British politics" demonstrating both "the range of her interests and the sharpness of her mind". Starting in 1908 Richardson regularly wrote short prose essays, "sketches" for the Saturday Review, and around 1912 "a reviewer urged her to try writing a novel". She began writing Pointed Roofs, in the autumn of 1912, while staying with J. D. Beresford and his wife in Cornwall, and it was published in 1915. • Illustration — Richardson (seated) and Alan Odle at St John's Wood, London in 1931 She married the artist Alan Odle (1888–1948) in 1917—a distinctly bohemian figure, associated with an artistic circle that included Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, and Wyndham Lewis. He was fifteen years younger than her, tubercular and an alcoholic, and was not expected to live long. However, he stopped drinking and lived until 1948. Odle was very thin and "over six feet tall with waist-length hair wound around the outside of his head", which he never cut. He also rarely cut his finger nails. From 1917 until 1939, the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London; and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle's death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years, as Alan made little money from his art. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up, with which her close friend Bryher was involved. The last chapters (books) of Pilgrimage published during Richardson's lifetime were Clear Horizon in 1935 and Dimple Hill in the 1938 Collected Edition. This edition received a disappointing critical reception and sold poorly, and Richardson, by now 65 years old, appears to have lost heart. During the rest of her life she published only three chapters of another volume, which appeared as "Work in Progress" in the literary journal Life and Letters in 1946. In 1954 she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died in 1957. The final chapter (thirteenth book) of Pilgrimage, March Moonlight, was not published until 1967, concluding the fourth volume of the new Collected Edition. This unfinished novel includes the material published as "Work in Progress" in 1946.

In a review of Pointed Roofs (The Egoist April 1918), May Sinclair first applied the term "stream of consciousness" in her discussion of Richardson's stylistic innovations. Pointed Roofs was the first volume of Pilgrimage, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. The term was first used by Alexander Bain in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, but is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. In a letter to the bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach in 1934, Richardson comments that "Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & D.R.... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously". Richardson hated the term, calling it in 1949 "that lamentably meaningless metaphor 'The Shroud of Consciousness' borrowed... by May Sinclair from the epistemologists,... to describe my work, & still, in Lit. criticism. pushing its inane career".

Miriam Henderson, the central character in the Pilgrimage novel sequence, is based on author's own life between 1891 and 1915. Richardson, however, saw Pilgrimage as one novel for which each of the individual volumes were "chapters". Pilgrimage was read as a work of fiction and "its critics did not suspect that its content was a reshaping of DMR's own experience", nor that it was a roman à clef.

After first working as a governess in Germany and then England, early in her life Richardson "lived in a Bloomsbury attic [at 7 Endsleigh Street]... [and] London became her great adventure. And although Pointed Roofs focuses on Miriam's experience as a governess in Germany, much of Pilgrimage is set in London. London "is an 'elastic' material space that facilitates Miriam's public life. London's streets, cafés, restaurants and clubs figure largely in her explorations, which extend her knowledge of both the city and herself". John Cowper Powys in his 1931 study of Richardson, describes her as London's William Wordsworth, who instead of "the mystery of mountains and lakes" gives us "the mystery of roof-tops and pavements".

• The Quakers Past and Present, London: Constable, 1914. • Gleanings from the Works of George Fox, London: Headley Brothers, 1914. • John Austen and the Inseparables, London: William Jackson, 1930 (about the artist John Austen). • Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches, London: Virago, 1989. • Pilgrimage • Four-volume collected editions: 1938 (first 12 "chapters"; Dent and Cresset, London, and A.A. Knopf, New York), 1967 (J. M. Dent, London, and A.A. Knopf, New York), 1976 (Popular Library, New York), 1979 (Virago, London) •: Publication history of Pilgrimage • Vol — Title — London publisher — Year — Notes • 1 — Pointed Roofs — Duckworth — 1915 — New York publication by A.A. Knopf was in 1916 • 2 — Backwater — Duckworth — 1916 • 3 — Honeycomb — Duckworth — 1917 • 4 — The Tunnel — Duckworth — 1919 • 5 — Interim — Duckworth — 1920 — Serialized in 1919 in The Little Review, alongside Ulysses • 6 — Deadlock — Duckworth — 1921 • 7 — Revolving Lights — Duckworth — 1923 • 8 — The Trap — Duckworth — 1925 • 9 — Oberland — Duckworth — 1927 • 10 — Dawn's Left Hand — Duckworth — 1931 • 11 — Clear Horizon — JM Dent and Cresset Press — 1935 • 12 — Dimple Hill — JM Dent and Cresset Press — 1938 — First published in volume 4 of the 1938 collected edition • 13 — March Moonlight — JM Dent — 1967 — First published in full in volume 4 of the 1967 collected edition. The first three chapters had appeared as "A Work in Progress" in the literary journal Life and Letters in 1946 See also the following feminist anthologies: • Scott, Bonnie Kime, The Gender of Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c1990. • Gilbert, Sandra M & Gubar, Susan Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York, N.Y.: Norton, c1985.

• Sinclair, M., "The novels of Dorothy Richardson", The Egoist, April 1918. • [[Virginia Woolf|[Woolf, V.]]], review of The Tunnel, (Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 1919); [V. Woolf], review of Revolving Lights, The Nation and the Athenaeum, 19 May 1923); both repr. in V. Woolf, Women and writing, ed. M. Barrett 1979. • Dorothy Richardson Society Bibliography: Reviews and Obituaries

• The Times, 18 June 1957. • Manchester Guardian, 18 June 1957.

• Fouli, Janet (ed.). The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson. London: Cecil Wolf, 2008. • Fromm, Gloria G. Dorothy Richardson: A Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. • Fromm, Gloria G. (ed.). Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Athens, Georgia, U. of Georgia Press, 1995. • Gregory, Horace. Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967. • Rosenberg, John D. Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot. A Critical Biography. London: Duckworth; New York: Knopf, 1973. • Thomson, George H. Dorothy Richardson: A Calendar of the Letters. ELT Press E-Book no.4, University of North Carolina at Greenboro.

• Blake, Caesar R. Dorothy M. Richardson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. • Bluemel, Kristin. Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson's 'Pilgrimage'. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. • Bowler, Rebecca. Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. • Eagleson, Harvey. Pedestal for Statue: 'The Novels of Dorothy M. Richardson. Sewanee, Tenn.: The University Press, 1934. • Fouli, Janet. Structure and Identity: the Creative Imagination in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Faculté des Lettres de la Manouba, Tunis, 1995. • Gevirtz, Susan. Narrative's Journey: the Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson. New York: P. Lang, 1996. • Hanscombe, Gillian E. The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness. London: Owen, 1982; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983. • Powys, John Cowper. Dorothy M. Richardson. London: Joiner & Steele, 1931. • Radford, Jean. Dorothy Richardson. New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. • Staley, Thomas F. Dorothy Richardson. Boston: Twayne, 1976. • Thomson, George H. Notes on 'Pilgrimage': Dorothy Richardson Annotated. Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 1999. • Thomson, George H. with Thomson, Dorothy F. The Editions of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage: A Comparison of Texts. Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 2001. • Tucker, Eva. Pilgrimage: The Enchanted Guest of Spring and Summer: Dorothy Richardson 1873-1954: a Reassessment of Her Life and Work. Penzance: Hypatia Press, 2003. • Watts, Carol. Dorothy Richardson. Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1995. • Winning, Joanne. The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

• Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Feminine Consciousness in the Modem British Novel. Urbana & London: University of Illinois Press, 1975. • Linett, Maren Tova. Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. • Parsons, Deborah. Theorists of the modernist novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.

Dorothy Richardson was recorded at birth as Dorothy Miller Richardson. The authorities additionally record the heading Dorothy (Miller) Richardson. Her recorded language was English. She married Alan Odle.