Dorothy Richardson: Difference between revisions

Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 - 17 June 1957) was the first writer to publish an English-language novel using what was to become known as the stream-of-consciousness technique^{[citation needed]}. Her thirteen novel sequence Pilgrimage is one of the great 20th century works of modernist and feminist literature in English.

Richardson was born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, into impoverished gentility. Her family moved to 6 Victoria Terrace in Heene in the town of Worthing in 1880 until her family moved to London in 1883. Later she moved to Liverpool College where she spent her time playing with wind chimes with Lucy Cross^[1] From the age of seventeen she was forced to earn her own living. This she did by working as a tutor-governess, first in Hanover, then in north London, and finally in an English country house. Her mother committed suicide while on a family holiday at Hastings in 1895,^[1] which led to the complete break-up of the family. Richardson moved back to London to work in Harley Street as secretary/assistant to a dentist.

In London, Richardson began moving among avant garde Socialist and artistic circles, including the Bloomsbury group. She started to publish translations and freelance journalism and eventually gave up her secretarial job. In 1917, she married the artist Alan Odle.^[2] Odle was fifteen years younger than Richardson and was a distinctly bohemian figure, with his waist-length hair wound around his head. Until Odle's death in 1948, the couple spent winters in Cornwall and summers in London.

Throughout her career, Richardson published large numbers of essays, poems, short stories, sketches and other pieces of journalism. However, her reputation as a writer rests firmly on the Pilgrimage sequence. The first of the Pilgrimage novels, Pointed Roofs (1915) was the first complete stream of consciousness novel in English (Joyce had already started writing Ulysses), although Richardson herself disliked the term (May Sinclair's import), preferring to call her way of writing interior monologues. The development of this technique is usually credited to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The failure to recognise Richardson's role is partly due to the critical neglect of Richardson's writing during her lifetime. The fact that Pointed Roofs displayed the writer's admiration for German culture at a time when Britain and Germany were at war may also have contributed to the general lack of recognition of the book's radical importance.

Richardson can also be read as a feminist writer, not because she overtly calls for equal rights for women but because her work quite simply assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. The central character in Pilgrimage, Miriam, is a woman in search of her own full identity, which she knows quite clearly cannot be defined in male terms of reference. Richardson's wariness of the conventions of language, her bending to near breaking point of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are means towards what she termed feminine prose, which she clearly saw as necessary for the expression of this female experience.

The following are the dates of publications of the "novel-chapters" that make up Pilgrimage. PILGRIMAGE - publication history 1) 1915 Pointed Roofs, Duckworth 2) 1916 Backwater, Duckworth 3) 1917 Honeycomb, Duckworth 4) 1919 The Tunnel, Duckworth [1920 Interim serialized in Little Review, along with Ulysses.] 5) 1920 Interim, Duckworth 6) 1921 Deadlock, Duckworth 7) 1923 Revolving Lights, Duckworth 8) 1925 The Trap 9) 1927 Oberland 10) 1931 Dawn’s Left Hand 11) 1935 Clear Horizon, JM Dent and Cresset Press 1938 Pilgrimage brought out by Dent and Cresset in 4 vols, the 4th containing 12) Dimple Hill pub for first time In 1946 April, May, Nov, 3 sections of “work in progress” published in Life and Letters - they are part of 13) March Moonlight, left in typescript when DMR dies, and not published til 1967 as 13th chapter of Pilgrimage.

Richardson died in June 17, 1957 in Beckenham, Kent, in her 85th year.

• Brief biography
• Dorothy Richardson webpage, Keele University
• Template:Worldcat id
• Works by Dorothy Richardson at Project Gutenberg

Dorothy Richardson: Pilgrimage. 4 vols (London, Virago. 1979).