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Pilgrimage #1-3
Pilgrimage 1
The thirteen magnificent novels that comprise Pilgrimage are the first expression in English of what it is to be called 'stream of consciousness' technique, predating the work of both Joyce and Woolf, echoing that of Proust with whom Dorothy Richardson stands as one of the great innovatory figures of our time. These four volumes record in detail the life of Miriam Henderson. Through her experience - personal, spiritual, intellectual - Dorothy Richardson explores intensely what it means to be a woman, presenting feminine consciousness with a new voice, a new identity.
490 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1915
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About the author
Dorothy M. Richardson
71 books64 followersDorothy Miller Richardson
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. 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 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.
Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to 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. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. 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, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. 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. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. 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 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.
Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to 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. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. 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, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. 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. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews
February 27, 2020
4.5 stars rounded up
My first dilemma is how to review this. Richardson’s classic has 13 novels. I have the four volume virago edition. Richardson did call the novels chapters. It seems to be a choice between reviewing the whole lot as one novel, reviewing each of the virago volumes or reviewing each novel separately. I have gone for the latter option mainly because it gives me a chance to meander a little and go off on tangents, which I am prone to do.
Dorothy Richardson is not as well-known as she should be, even reading the first of this series has shown me that. Pointed Roofs was written in the same year that Proust published Swann’s Way and just before Joyce published Dubliners. That is pertinent because the work of the three has been increasingly compared. One of the reviewers of Pointed Roofs used the term “stream of consciousness”; it was coined to describe Richardson’s work, although it appears that she preferred the term “interior monologue”.
The protagonist for all 13 novels is Miriam Henderson; the novels starting in March 1893 and continuing to late 1912. This first one covers a mere 4 months in 1893. Miriam is moving to Germany to take up a position as an English teacher in a small German girl’s school. Interestingly this was partly written and published during the First World War, which may have been the reason for the lack of attention, because it is certainly not anti-German.
I think my first thoughts about the book focussed on the overall title. Why pilgrimage? We are familiar with the idea of pilgrimage as a spiritually significant journey to a place a special significance. This is the journey of a life, not a religious pilgrimage, so I suspect it may be all about the journey; time will tell. It is interesting to compare with Joyce and Proust. Proust is looking back over a life and looking at the passage of time. Joyce’s Ulysses, set in one day mirrors the Odyssey. There is a sense of journey in Pointed Roofs as Miriam at 17 fresh from school leaves her home and country at a time when more conventional possibilities would have been available.
Even though this is the beginning of a journey, there is also a strong sense of the end of something as well. Richardson perfectly captures something that I recognise from when I first left home. Miriam is thinking about how life will continue without her when she has gone;
“That summer, which still seemed near to her, was going to fade and desert her, leaving nothing behind. Tomorrow it would belong to a world which would go on without her, taking no heed. There would still be blissful days. But she would not be in them. There would be no more silent sunny mornings with all the day ahead and nothing to do and no end anywhere to anything; no more sitting at the open window in the dining room, reading.”
I remember that feeling that nothing would ever be the same again for me as I prepared to go to university; Richardson captures the feeling very well.
This is not an all action novel, it is about everyday life and interrelationships. Miriam is not a particularly sociable protagonist, but she is a sharp observer of those around her and the subtleties of human feelings and jealousies.
Although Richardson is not as well-known as she should be, there is a whole industry around her and a journal devoted to studying her. There is no doubt that Richardson was breaking new ground in trying outline and construct a female consciousness. A good start to what, I think, will be a fascinating series of novels.
I am also reading The Waves at the moment and it will make an interesting comparison.
My first dilemma is how to review this. Richardson’s classic has 13 novels. I have the four volume virago edition. Richardson did call the novels chapters. It seems to be a choice between reviewing the whole lot as one novel, reviewing each of the virago volumes or reviewing each novel separately. I have gone for the latter option mainly because it gives me a chance to meander a little and go off on tangents, which I am prone to do.
Dorothy Richardson is not as well-known as she should be, even reading the first of this series has shown me that. Pointed Roofs was written in the same year that Proust published Swann’s Way and just before Joyce published Dubliners. That is pertinent because the work of the three has been increasingly compared. One of the reviewers of Pointed Roofs used the term “stream of consciousness”; it was coined to describe Richardson’s work, although it appears that she preferred the term “interior monologue”.
The protagonist for all 13 novels is Miriam Henderson; the novels starting in March 1893 and continuing to late 1912. This first one covers a mere 4 months in 1893. Miriam is moving to Germany to take up a position as an English teacher in a small German girl’s school. Interestingly this was partly written and published during the First World War, which may have been the reason for the lack of attention, because it is certainly not anti-German.
I think my first thoughts about the book focussed on the overall title. Why pilgrimage? We are familiar with the idea of pilgrimage as a spiritually significant journey to a place a special significance. This is the journey of a life, not a religious pilgrimage, so I suspect it may be all about the journey; time will tell. It is interesting to compare with Joyce and Proust. Proust is looking back over a life and looking at the passage of time. Joyce’s Ulysses, set in one day mirrors the Odyssey. There is a sense of journey in Pointed Roofs as Miriam at 17 fresh from school leaves her home and country at a time when more conventional possibilities would have been available.
Even though this is the beginning of a journey, there is also a strong sense of the end of something as well. Richardson perfectly captures something that I recognise from when I first left home. Miriam is thinking about how life will continue without her when she has gone;
“That summer, which still seemed near to her, was going to fade and desert her, leaving nothing behind. Tomorrow it would belong to a world which would go on without her, taking no heed. There would still be blissful days. But she would not be in them. There would be no more silent sunny mornings with all the day ahead and nothing to do and no end anywhere to anything; no more sitting at the open window in the dining room, reading.”
I remember that feeling that nothing would ever be the same again for me as I prepared to go to university; Richardson captures the feeling very well.
This is not an all action novel, it is about everyday life and interrelationships. Miriam is not a particularly sociable protagonist, but she is a sharp observer of those around her and the subtleties of human feelings and jealousies.
Although Richardson is not as well-known as she should be, there is a whole industry around her and a journal devoted to studying her. There is no doubt that Richardson was breaking new ground in trying outline and construct a female consciousness. A good start to what, I think, will be a fascinating series of novels.
I am also reading The Waves at the moment and it will make an interesting comparison.
December 9, 2015
So...a quick comment based on skimming the lackluster reviews for this on GR. Most people seem to have problems with what is described as "lack of plot" or "nothing happening" or that the narrative is "disjointed". To critique the work thus is to completely misunderstand it and the intent of its author.
If we demand that our writers do violence to the disjointed nature of experience by forcing it into a "plot" we will deprive ourselves of a great deal. DR has attempted to record the consciousness and the experiences of a young woman, not write a soap opera. By doing so she gives us a much more interesting window on the reality of our Being.
Personally this reader found the whole thing sped along at a lovely pace and was fascinated to spend time in the mind that had its brief, youthful existence over a hundred years ago.
And, finally, my god there are some wonderful sentences in this...she really can write very beautifully indeed.
On to Blackwater for me...
For those of you interested - I have set up a group for DR here on GR which is slowing growing as a location to store resources about her - feel free to join if you are interested: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
If we demand that our writers do violence to the disjointed nature of experience by forcing it into a "plot" we will deprive ourselves of a great deal. DR has attempted to record the consciousness and the experiences of a young woman, not write a soap opera. By doing so she gives us a much more interesting window on the reality of our Being.
Personally this reader found the whole thing sped along at a lovely pace and was fascinated to spend time in the mind that had its brief, youthful existence over a hundred years ago.
And, finally, my god there are some wonderful sentences in this...she really can write very beautifully indeed.
On to Blackwater for me...
For those of you interested - I have set up a group for DR here on GR which is slowing growing as a location to store resources about her - feel free to join if you are interested: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
September 17, 2023
‘Isn’t life the plot?’ - Dorothy M. Richardson
Although, for me, it’s more likely to conjure up authors like Virginia Woolf or even James Joyce, the notion of stream of consciousness initially surfaced in May Sinclair’s 1918 review of British writer Dorothy Richardson, Sinclair was trying to convey Richardson’s approach in the early stages of, what became, her Pilgrimage cycle, 13 novels that Richardson considered more as chapters in one ongoing story:
“…there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is …Miriam Henderson's stream of consciousness going on and on”
Miriam Henderson is Pilgrimage’s central character, the events of her life closely resemble Richardson’s own, although how far Miriam actually mirrors Richardson is hard to tell – Richardson apparently hated interviews about her personal life or beliefs. Miriam first appears in 1915’s Pointed Roofs. Its opening suggests the beginning of a familiar, conventional story about a young woman whose once-settled, middle-class existence has been shattered by her father’s financial difficulties, forcing her to think about finding a way to earn some money of her own. It’s early 1893, Miriam’s 17, like a character in one of the Brontës’ earlier stories, her best - possibly only - option’s teaching. Miriam finds a job at a small, private girls’ school in Germany – which contemporary reviewers compared to the one featured in Villette.
Richardson’s account of Miriam’s time in Germany is incredibly detailed but weirdly vague too, Richardson’s impressionistic style often borders on opaque. Miriam’s transition’s clearly traumatic, after a comfortable, sheltered upbringing, she’s overwhelmed by homesickness and the demands of her exacting first boss. Surrounded by women, Miriam is also struggling with her sense of self - at home her father treated her like the son he never had. So, although Miriam presents like a typical Victorian lady, it’s not how she actually feels – Richardson’s far more interested in representing an interior self than she is in standard plots or characters. Miriam’s coming of age in a time of transition, so-called ‘new women’ were either inspiring or scandalising society, and Miriam is caught somewhere in between. Richardson represents Miriam’s inner conflict through reactions that might seem unremarkable, for example Miriam’s awkwardness about her inexpensive, old clothes and her discomfort about wearing a new blouse she receives as a gift – the design’s similar to the kind adopted as a uniform by cohorts of so-called ‘new women.’ Awkwardness and uncertainty about where she fits, and conflict around gender and identity, preoccupy Miriam throughout her time in Germany, contributing to her sense of isolation and distance from the other women there.
In Backwater it’s now August 1893, Miriam is still teaching but back in England at a school in London’s Finsbury Park. This Miriam is less diffident, angrier and more curious, burying herself in books in order to escape her suffocating surroundings – but she’s ditched classic fiction in favour of controversial/scandalous contemporary writers like Ouida. The school’s full of tradesmen’s daughters setting off reflections on class and culture, meanwhile her sisters are thinking about marriage and motherhood, things Miriam finds hard to imagine wanting for herself.
It's 1895, Oscar Wilde’s on trial and Miriam leaves Finsbury Park to work as a governess to two children on a large estate close to London, events covered in Richardson’s third book Honeycomb. Class and internal conflicts are again central, with Miriam now the low-status character in an enclosed society of wealthy families. Miriam loves the luxury of her employers' house, its beautifully-tended gardens and expensive flowers but she hates being the poor outsider. She despises the wives who visit the house but she envies their money and their security. But in other ways she’s more self-assured, defiantly smoking in public which marks her out as finally a ‘new woman’ challenging the conventions of middle-class England. In her spare time Miriam wanders the London streets, wondering what her future might be like. Domesticity terrifies her as does the idea of catering for men like her sisters, she wants a new existence that's entirely her own but she’s stuck paying off her father’s debts. Her parents are in turmoil, especially her mother and the novel ends with her death by suicide. Just like the author, Miriam discovers her mother’s body although the way Richardson writes this is so oblique it’s hard to work out what’s actually happened. Richardson’s style’s more and more elliptical as she attempts to capture sensations, sights, colours, and sound. Overall, a fascinating, unique insight into a woman’s life in the 1890s, equal parts gripping and frustrating.
Although, for me, it’s more likely to conjure up authors like Virginia Woolf or even James Joyce, the notion of stream of consciousness initially surfaced in May Sinclair’s 1918 review of British writer Dorothy Richardson, Sinclair was trying to convey Richardson’s approach in the early stages of, what became, her Pilgrimage cycle, 13 novels that Richardson considered more as chapters in one ongoing story:
“…there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is …Miriam Henderson's stream of consciousness going on and on”
Miriam Henderson is Pilgrimage’s central character, the events of her life closely resemble Richardson’s own, although how far Miriam actually mirrors Richardson is hard to tell – Richardson apparently hated interviews about her personal life or beliefs. Miriam first appears in 1915’s Pointed Roofs. Its opening suggests the beginning of a familiar, conventional story about a young woman whose once-settled, middle-class existence has been shattered by her father’s financial difficulties, forcing her to think about finding a way to earn some money of her own. It’s early 1893, Miriam’s 17, like a character in one of the Brontës’ earlier stories, her best - possibly only - option’s teaching. Miriam finds a job at a small, private girls’ school in Germany – which contemporary reviewers compared to the one featured in Villette.
Richardson’s account of Miriam’s time in Germany is incredibly detailed but weirdly vague too, Richardson’s impressionistic style often borders on opaque. Miriam’s transition’s clearly traumatic, after a comfortable, sheltered upbringing, she’s overwhelmed by homesickness and the demands of her exacting first boss. Surrounded by women, Miriam is also struggling with her sense of self - at home her father treated her like the son he never had. So, although Miriam presents like a typical Victorian lady, it’s not how she actually feels – Richardson’s far more interested in representing an interior self than she is in standard plots or characters. Miriam’s coming of age in a time of transition, so-called ‘new women’ were either inspiring or scandalising society, and Miriam is caught somewhere in between. Richardson represents Miriam’s inner conflict through reactions that might seem unremarkable, for example Miriam’s awkwardness about her inexpensive, old clothes and her discomfort about wearing a new blouse she receives as a gift – the design’s similar to the kind adopted as a uniform by cohorts of so-called ‘new women.’ Awkwardness and uncertainty about where she fits, and conflict around gender and identity, preoccupy Miriam throughout her time in Germany, contributing to her sense of isolation and distance from the other women there.
In Backwater it’s now August 1893, Miriam is still teaching but back in England at a school in London’s Finsbury Park. This Miriam is less diffident, angrier and more curious, burying herself in books in order to escape her suffocating surroundings – but she’s ditched classic fiction in favour of controversial/scandalous contemporary writers like Ouida. The school’s full of tradesmen’s daughters setting off reflections on class and culture, meanwhile her sisters are thinking about marriage and motherhood, things Miriam finds hard to imagine wanting for herself.
It's 1895, Oscar Wilde’s on trial and Miriam leaves Finsbury Park to work as a governess to two children on a large estate close to London, events covered in Richardson’s third book Honeycomb. Class and internal conflicts are again central, with Miriam now the low-status character in an enclosed society of wealthy families. Miriam loves the luxury of her employers' house, its beautifully-tended gardens and expensive flowers but she hates being the poor outsider. She despises the wives who visit the house but she envies their money and their security. But in other ways she’s more self-assured, defiantly smoking in public which marks her out as finally a ‘new woman’ challenging the conventions of middle-class England. In her spare time Miriam wanders the London streets, wondering what her future might be like. Domesticity terrifies her as does the idea of catering for men like her sisters, she wants a new existence that's entirely her own but she’s stuck paying off her father’s debts. Her parents are in turmoil, especially her mother and the novel ends with her death by suicide. Just like the author, Miriam discovers her mother’s body although the way Richardson writes this is so oblique it’s hard to work out what’s actually happened. Richardson’s style’s more and more elliptical as she attempts to capture sensations, sights, colours, and sound. Overall, a fascinating, unique insight into a woman’s life in the 1890s, equal parts gripping and frustrating.
March 15, 2025
Re-reading 2025
Vol. 3: Honeycomb
This third volume really picks up pace in terms of both subject matter and in Richardson's stylistics - we're moving towards stream-of-consciousness in parts, though some is still more conventional internal monologue. Importantly, we're continuously inside Miriam's head and body, experiencing the world via her sensations and thoughts.
Having moved on from the Finsbury Park school, Miriam is now a live-in personal tutor at a nouveau riche household, giving plenty of scope for her skeptical and increasingly vicious inner commentary. She grows to love the trappings of wealth: big, clean, sunny rooms filled with out-of-season flowers, for instance, and resents that she can't afford these for herself despite her hard work. Her political consciousness is growing here following the revelation in an earlier book of newspapers that gave her access to the doings of the government. At the same time, she can't help but dislike her employers and their friends for their ignorance, their bourgeois conventionality, their emptiness, their time spent buying and trying on hats in the absence of anything more meaningful to occupy their time.
But things are changing in the family too: two of Miriam's sisters get married and their mother is ill: even when they find possible medical regimes, they can't afford them. And the ending combines great emotionalism with a matching dissolution in the writing, to create a coherence in subject and form.
I'm hooked on this now and am looking forward to continuing on Miriam's pilgrimage.
Vol. 2: Backwater
Backwater, the second volume in Pilgrimages, continues Miriam's radically modernist journey through the last decade of the nineteenth century. Having returned from Germany, she's now employed at a private school in Finsbury Park, a doomy London suburb. Little happens on the surface but we see the gradually emerging consciousness of this 18 year old: she is an atheist in a world than can barely envisage this position; she is torn between fantasies of love and a determination that marriage is not her fate; and we see the beginnings of a social consciousness as she reads a newspaper for the first time and has the intimation that what the government is doing is not outside her sphere of interests or solely the provenance of men. Even Miriam's reading - at night until 3 am - is positioned as transgressive: Ouida.
Richardson's own technique is similarly emerging. There are instances of recognisable stream of consciousness, intercut with interior monologues, some still using conventional speech marks. But with more ellipses alongside the more normal punctuation, the style is evolving.
I'm hooked on this re-read of 'pilgrimage' of both Miriam and Richardson!
Vol. 1: Pointed Roofs
Coincidentally finished on International Women's Day, this is the opening 'chapter' of Richardson's 13-book Pilgrimage which charts the life of Miriam via her subjectivity and interiority. This opening volume itself shifts between a conventional mode of narrative and Miriam's inner thoughts: not stream of consciousness, as is often claimed, but certainly a fragmented and sometimes jumpy portrait of Miriam's experience.
First published in 1915 though set about twenty years earlier in c.1895, this is playing in the same space as Woolf, Proust and Joyce. We see Miriam at 17 leaving home to become a governess-pupil in a school in Germany so definite shades of nineteenth-century novels: Jane Eyre and, especially Villette which gets name-checked via Madame Beck. Miriam is the only prism through which we access this experience so we have no objective markers to assess her views and responses: we see and hear the other pupils, have a sense of this world via Miriam's impressions, physical, emotional and intellectual. We share her disorientation and gradual accommodation; we feel her awkward clumsiness when her new blouses are too billowy for her body; we share her indignation and gradually evolving consciousness as she starts to map her place in the political and ideological world of the early twentieth century; and we see the instabilities of her personality, at times almost misanthropic, at others warmed by her inclusion in the group of girls.
All action is, accordingly, internal: little happens on the surface in terms of plot. But that's part of what Richardson is challenging, as well as shifting the bildungsroman to a female consciousness.
The first time I started Pilgrimage, I stalled on the 3rd chapter. Re-reading this, I realised that to read Richardson, I need to calm my mind of external attention-seekers and find a kind of inner equilibrium to match the focus of the narrative. Here's hoping that this time I'll make it to the end - I'm now invested in Miriam and her journey through life and text.
-----------------Original Review----------------
Although this is volume 1 in the Virago edition, it actually comprises the first three novels (novellas?) in Richardson's Pilgrimage series. I'm pausing at the end of the first novella and so will add to this review as I finish the other two.
Pointed Roofs
In this first book, Miriam takes her first post as a governess in a school in Germany. There are definite shades of Villette both in the situation and in Miriam's personality which has some of the uncompromising aspects of Lucy Snowe, though Miriam feels like a subjectivity in the process of being formed.
I'm somewhat confused at seeing this described as stream of consciousness - it's not (though perhaps the later volumes are). It is, though, very interior with everything filtered through Miriam's experience.
In this early book we see her slight awkwardness, her refusal to act like a 'nice' girl as prescribed by society, and her questioning of other cultural norms. Little happens but Miriam's striking independence of thought and action makes this an intriguing journey to watch.
Backwater and Honeycomb
Disappointingly, I found these novels more interesting than enjoyable: they're striking for the independence of their young protagonist, Miriam, who, despite her solid middle-class upbringing and family, takes herself off to work in Germany, then back in England as a governess, when she is just 18. We experience her impressions of the settings she finds herself in, the people and students amongst whom she lives, the young men she meets and the changes in her family home.
Oddly, though, Miriam rarely seems to engage emotionally and while the technical articulation of her stream of experiences (not yet really stream of consciousness) may push the development of the novel forward, I too often found myself a slightly bored bystander to the book rather than experiencing it via Miriam's perceptions.
She's an interesting mix of quiet questioning: she doesn't subscribe to conventional religious feeling, she's rather nicely scathing about men's privileged positions, she's socially awkward and insecure, thinking, for example, that her pupils don't like her and then being stunned as they sob at her leaving. She wants something that isn't just marriage or a filler, amateur, governess job but she doesn't yet know what that is.
There's a marked step-up in writing technique at the end of Honeycomb which moves closer to stream of consciousness, focusing on Miriam's feelings rather than the event, which we have to intuit, which causes them. Which is slightly frustrating as I was ready to pause on the Pilgrimage sequence but now wonder if I should push on...
Based on this volume alone, it's clear why Woolf was both intrigued by Richardson's work and yet also found Pointed Roofs (I don't know about the other books) an interesting failure. Their innovation stems from their minute detailing of a female consciousness taking its first steps into a wider world and thinking deliberately about how to use language to capture and articulate that experience. In that sense, we can place Richardson in a female writing tradition somewhere between Charlotte Bronte (I'm thinking especially of Villette) and Woolf herself. But that very relationship also foregrounds Richardson's inadequacies: the subjective self she is creating is, for me frustratingly boring, something which Woolf never is.
3 stars for pushing forward the development of the novel away from Victorian stylistics and towards literary modernism... but I'm unsure whether I'll push on with Miriam's journey.
Vol. 3: Honeycomb
Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan't kill me... I'll shatter his conceited brow - make him see... two sides to every question... a million sides... no questions, only sides... always changing.
This third volume really picks up pace in terms of both subject matter and in Richardson's stylistics - we're moving towards stream-of-consciousness in parts, though some is still more conventional internal monologue. Importantly, we're continuously inside Miriam's head and body, experiencing the world via her sensations and thoughts.
Having moved on from the Finsbury Park school, Miriam is now a live-in personal tutor at a nouveau riche household, giving plenty of scope for her skeptical and increasingly vicious inner commentary. She grows to love the trappings of wealth: big, clean, sunny rooms filled with out-of-season flowers, for instance, and resents that she can't afford these for herself despite her hard work. Her political consciousness is growing here following the revelation in an earlier book of newspapers that gave her access to the doings of the government. At the same time, she can't help but dislike her employers and their friends for their ignorance, their bourgeois conventionality, their emptiness, their time spent buying and trying on hats in the absence of anything more meaningful to occupy their time.
But things are changing in the family too: two of Miriam's sisters get married and their mother is ill: even when they find possible medical regimes, they can't afford them. And the ending combines great emotionalism with a matching dissolution in the writing, to create a coherence in subject and form.
I'm hooked on this now and am looking forward to continuing on Miriam's pilgrimage.
Vol. 2: Backwater
"God, what a filthy world! God, what a filthy world!" she muttered. "Everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed into it."
Backwater, the second volume in Pilgrimages, continues Miriam's radically modernist journey through the last decade of the nineteenth century. Having returned from Germany, she's now employed at a private school in Finsbury Park, a doomy London suburb. Little happens on the surface but we see the gradually emerging consciousness of this 18 year old: she is an atheist in a world than can barely envisage this position; she is torn between fantasies of love and a determination that marriage is not her fate; and we see the beginnings of a social consciousness as she reads a newspaper for the first time and has the intimation that what the government is doing is not outside her sphere of interests or solely the provenance of men. Even Miriam's reading - at night until 3 am - is positioned as transgressive: Ouida.
Richardson's own technique is similarly emerging. There are instances of recognisable stream of consciousness, intercut with interior monologues, some still using conventional speech marks. But with more ellipses alongside the more normal punctuation, the style is evolving.
I'm hooked on this re-read of 'pilgrimage' of both Miriam and Richardson!
Vol. 1: Pointed Roofs
Coincidentally finished on International Women's Day, this is the opening 'chapter' of Richardson's 13-book Pilgrimage which charts the life of Miriam via her subjectivity and interiority. This opening volume itself shifts between a conventional mode of narrative and Miriam's inner thoughts: not stream of consciousness, as is often claimed, but certainly a fragmented and sometimes jumpy portrait of Miriam's experience.
First published in 1915 though set about twenty years earlier in c.1895, this is playing in the same space as Woolf, Proust and Joyce. We see Miriam at 17 leaving home to become a governess-pupil in a school in Germany so definite shades of nineteenth-century novels: Jane Eyre and, especially Villette which gets name-checked via Madame Beck. Miriam is the only prism through which we access this experience so we have no objective markers to assess her views and responses: we see and hear the other pupils, have a sense of this world via Miriam's impressions, physical, emotional and intellectual. We share her disorientation and gradual accommodation; we feel her awkward clumsiness when her new blouses are too billowy for her body; we share her indignation and gradually evolving consciousness as she starts to map her place in the political and ideological world of the early twentieth century; and we see the instabilities of her personality, at times almost misanthropic, at others warmed by her inclusion in the group of girls.
All action is, accordingly, internal: little happens on the surface in terms of plot. But that's part of what Richardson is challenging, as well as shifting the bildungsroman to a female consciousness.
The first time I started Pilgrimage, I stalled on the 3rd chapter. Re-reading this, I realised that to read Richardson, I need to calm my mind of external attention-seekers and find a kind of inner equilibrium to match the focus of the narrative. Here's hoping that this time I'll make it to the end - I'm now invested in Miriam and her journey through life and text.
-----------------Original Review----------------
Although this is volume 1 in the Virago edition, it actually comprises the first three novels (novellas?) in Richardson's Pilgrimage series. I'm pausing at the end of the first novella and so will add to this review as I finish the other two.
Pointed Roofs
In this first book, Miriam takes her first post as a governess in a school in Germany. There are definite shades of Villette both in the situation and in Miriam's personality which has some of the uncompromising aspects of Lucy Snowe, though Miriam feels like a subjectivity in the process of being formed.
I'm somewhat confused at seeing this described as stream of consciousness - it's not (though perhaps the later volumes are). It is, though, very interior with everything filtered through Miriam's experience.
In this early book we see her slight awkwardness, her refusal to act like a 'nice' girl as prescribed by society, and her questioning of other cultural norms. Little happens but Miriam's striking independence of thought and action makes this an intriguing journey to watch.
Backwater and Honeycomb
Disappointingly, I found these novels more interesting than enjoyable: they're striking for the independence of their young protagonist, Miriam, who, despite her solid middle-class upbringing and family, takes herself off to work in Germany, then back in England as a governess, when she is just 18. We experience her impressions of the settings she finds herself in, the people and students amongst whom she lives, the young men she meets and the changes in her family home.
Oddly, though, Miriam rarely seems to engage emotionally and while the technical articulation of her stream of experiences (not yet really stream of consciousness) may push the development of the novel forward, I too often found myself a slightly bored bystander to the book rather than experiencing it via Miriam's perceptions.
She's an interesting mix of quiet questioning: she doesn't subscribe to conventional religious feeling, she's rather nicely scathing about men's privileged positions, she's socially awkward and insecure, thinking, for example, that her pupils don't like her and then being stunned as they sob at her leaving. She wants something that isn't just marriage or a filler, amateur, governess job but she doesn't yet know what that is.
There's a marked step-up in writing technique at the end of Honeycomb which moves closer to stream of consciousness, focusing on Miriam's feelings rather than the event, which we have to intuit, which causes them. Which is slightly frustrating as I was ready to pause on the Pilgrimage sequence but now wonder if I should push on...
Based on this volume alone, it's clear why Woolf was both intrigued by Richardson's work and yet also found Pointed Roofs (I don't know about the other books) an interesting failure. Their innovation stems from their minute detailing of a female consciousness taking its first steps into a wider world and thinking deliberately about how to use language to capture and articulate that experience. In that sense, we can place Richardson in a female writing tradition somewhere between Charlotte Bronte (I'm thinking especially of Villette) and Woolf herself. But that very relationship also foregrounds Richardson's inadequacies: the subjective self she is creating is, for me frustratingly boring, something which Woolf never is.
3 stars for pushing forward the development of the novel away from Victorian stylistics and towards literary modernism... but I'm unsure whether I'll push on with Miriam's journey.
January 8, 2015
A work of genius from an unjustly buried and shamefully neglected modernist. Fans of Woolf or Proust will love it, and should get hold of a copy as soon as they can. Her writing is unique, and the extraordinary window it provides into the development, the growth, of a young proto-feminist mind is simply unparalleled. The drama and the "plot" here is that of growing slowly older, experiencing the world - whilst there are some "dramatic" events, one should not read this text expecting fireworks (though there are some real fireworks - which Miriam hates because they are too damn noisy)
A group collating resources about her and her work, and providing a place for discussion, can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
From Honeycomb
"She knew at once that she did not want to read the book through; that it was what people called a tragedy, that the author had deliberately made it a tragedy; something black and twisted and painful, painful came to her out of every page; but seriously to read it right through and be excited about the tragic story seemed silly and pitiful. The thought of Mrs. Corrie and Joey doing this annoyed her and impatiently she wanted to tell them that there was nothing in it, nothing in the things the author wanted to make them believe; that was fraud, humbug. .. they missed everything. They could not see through it, they read through to the happy ending or the sad ending and took it all seriously. She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could look at the end, and read here and there a little and know; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that. . even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence - and the "stronger" the author was the more came. That was why Ouida put those others in the shade, not, not, not because her books were improper. It was her, herself somehow. Then you read books to find the author! That was it. That was the difference. . that was how one was different from most people.. . Dear Eve; I have just discovered that I don't read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author. . she must write that to Eve at once; to-morrow. It was rather awful and strange. It meant never being able to agree with people about books, never liking them for the same reasons as other people…But it was true and exciting. It meant…things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author. She clung to the volume in her hand with a sense of wealth. Its very binding, the feeling of it, the sight of the slender serried edges of the closed leaves came to her as having a sacredness. . and the world was full of books. ..
It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, " stories " - they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word.
Why did this strange book come so near, nearer than any others, so that you felt the writing, felt the sentences as if you were writing them yourself? He was a sad pained man, all wrong; bothered and tragic about things, believing in sad black horror. Then why did he come so near? Perhaps because life was sad. Perhaps life was really sad. No; it was somehow the writing, the clearness. That was the thing. He himself must be all right, if he was so clear. Then it was dangerous, dangerous to people like Mrs. Corrie and Joey who would attend only to what he said, and not to him…sadness or gladness, saying things were sad or glad did not matter; there was something behind all the time, something inside people. That was why it was impossible to pretend to sympathise with people. You don't have to sympathise with authors; you just get at them, neither happy nor sad; like talking, more than talking. Then that was why the people who wrote moral stories were so awful. They were standing behind the pages preaching at you with smarmy voices…Bunyan?...No…He preached to himself too…crying out his sins…He did not get between you and himself and point at a moral. An author must show himself. Anyhow, he can't help showing himself. A moral writer only sees the mote in his brother's eye. And you see him seeing it. "
A group collating resources about her and her work, and providing a place for discussion, can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
From Honeycomb
"She knew at once that she did not want to read the book through; that it was what people called a tragedy, that the author had deliberately made it a tragedy; something black and twisted and painful, painful came to her out of every page; but seriously to read it right through and be excited about the tragic story seemed silly and pitiful. The thought of Mrs. Corrie and Joey doing this annoyed her and impatiently she wanted to tell them that there was nothing in it, nothing in the things the author wanted to make them believe; that was fraud, humbug. .. they missed everything. They could not see through it, they read through to the happy ending or the sad ending and took it all seriously. She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could look at the end, and read here and there a little and know; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that. . even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence - and the "stronger" the author was the more came. That was why Ouida put those others in the shade, not, not, not because her books were improper. It was her, herself somehow. Then you read books to find the author! That was it. That was the difference. . that was how one was different from most people.. . Dear Eve; I have just discovered that I don't read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author. . she must write that to Eve at once; to-morrow. It was rather awful and strange. It meant never being able to agree with people about books, never liking them for the same reasons as other people…But it was true and exciting. It meant…things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author. She clung to the volume in her hand with a sense of wealth. Its very binding, the feeling of it, the sight of the slender serried edges of the closed leaves came to her as having a sacredness. . and the world was full of books. ..
It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, " stories " - they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word.
Why did this strange book come so near, nearer than any others, so that you felt the writing, felt the sentences as if you were writing them yourself? He was a sad pained man, all wrong; bothered and tragic about things, believing in sad black horror. Then why did he come so near? Perhaps because life was sad. Perhaps life was really sad. No; it was somehow the writing, the clearness. That was the thing. He himself must be all right, if he was so clear. Then it was dangerous, dangerous to people like Mrs. Corrie and Joey who would attend only to what he said, and not to him…sadness or gladness, saying things were sad or glad did not matter; there was something behind all the time, something inside people. That was why it was impossible to pretend to sympathise with people. You don't have to sympathise with authors; you just get at them, neither happy nor sad; like talking, more than talking. Then that was why the people who wrote moral stories were so awful. They were standing behind the pages preaching at you with smarmy voices…Bunyan?...No…He preached to himself too…crying out his sins…He did not get between you and himself and point at a moral. An author must show himself. Anyhow, he can't help showing himself. A moral writer only sees the mote in his brother's eye. And you see him seeing it. "
January 27, 2015
"'It will make me simply ill--I could never describe to you,' said Miriam, with her face aglow, 'what it is to me to hear some silly man drone away with an undistributed middle term.'"
Dorothy Richardson was a modernist. Virginia Woolf was a modernist. Therefore Virginia Woolf was Dorothy Richardson. This would be plain before everyone's eyes, but not everyone has the same eyes.
"They had dreadful eyes--eyes like the eyes of hostesses..."
By using those eyes to absorb this text you will gain access to forgotten areas of your past, such as when you had to leave the warmth and familiarity of your home to take a job overseas as a governness at a girls' school. On the eve of your departure, your sadness suffused every sense with a delicate attunement to everything around you, especially your sister's tears.
It's time for a makeover, Miriam Henderson.
"They performed an uproarious toilet."
So begins a long sojourn of self-discovery, self-creation, and a multi-volume literary selfie.
Literally hundreds of billions of books have been written about protagonists who are special, who are aware they are not like everyone else, whose disdain for false notions and fake people forms an idiosyncratic worldview. The writer of such a book then has a mighty task: to convince you, the reader, that you are also such a person and that is why you identify with the protagonist. The writer must also shield from your mind the idea that, statistically, you likely are not actually this special, that the book has crowds of readers who feel the same empathetic identification you do, perhaps even with better reason. While the feeling each of us cherishes regarding our individual uniqueness is easy enough to access for a competent writer, it's a harder trick to create a character who boasts the oxymoron of being equally unique without alienating all the other readers but you, or alienating you while engaging others. And there's such a fine line between engaging and ingratiating, isn't there?
So it seems to me that the writer of this sort of protagonist is better off neglecting attractive particulars of character and betting on the power of a true portrait. I don't mean true in the sense of factual; I mean an immersion of the character in a completeness of experience, a consistent relationship with the day-to-day of the sensual, the psychological, and the social. This book sacrifices many of the conventions we expect of novels toward this end.
So what happens? Given the set-up, there is a handful of plots to anticipate: Miriam goes off to teach at a foreign school where secrets are held and there is something sinister to discover; Miriam leaves home for a strange land where she is seduced and abandoned and she must struggle to avoid ruin; she arrives in a new place to meet a handsome but unavailable man and they must overcome obstacles to fulfill their romance (there may even be an alternate man who is unappealing but more "correct" for reasons like class, nationality, family wishes, etc.).
Spoiler: none of these things happen. Not a spoiler: really, these things usually do not happen. Spoiler: the ideology of modernism is actually sometimes realism, despite what Wikipedia says:
"Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism."
I believe one should always go with a James Joyce quote over Wikipedia:
"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead prose."
It seems to me that this is not a rejection of realism but a more ambitious version of it, going for portrayal of that "great part of every human existence" which has been unrealistically excluded from supposed realistic novels.
So rather than unrealistically hinging on a mysterious secret, a pitiable downfall, or a forbidden romance, this novel's realistic crux is the simple smile.
Miriam does not smile enough.
"They would be so affable at first. She had been through it a million times—all her life—all eternity. They would smile those hateful women's smiles—smirks—self-satisfied smiles as if everybody were agreed about everything. She loathed women. They always smiled."
Ok, so it's not just smiles, but what they signal for Miriam about shallowness of personality and social niceties.
"Then as she watched their faces as they sang she felt that she knew all these women, the way, with little personal differences, they would talk, the way they would smile and take things for granted."
And it isn't just about social superficialities, but larger things (oh, and men, too):
"those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair."
As she adjusts to life at this new school, Miram is torn between the human desire for belonging, fitting in, and her disdain for superficial unserious people. She resents the pressure to become one or at least act like one. To be ingratiating and pleasant is distinctly unpleasant for Miriam. From clothing (lots of clothing details) to daily habits to accents to (especially) attitude, Miriam is constantly reminded of her difference, so while the book delivers a comprehensive fullness of day-to-day detail, it is by way of this that we inhabit Miriam's mind in her every reaction. But this does lead her to ponder whether her unusual quality is due to her upbringing, her schooling, or something deeper, more essential:
"If she had been brought up differently, it could not, she felt sure, have made her very different—for long—nor taught her to be affable—to smile that smile she hated so."
So it seems: it's just her.
And, quite realistically, being immersed in our own self-perception allows in only a few trickles of clues as to how others perceive us. Miriam is slow to gauge these and--when it becomes important--is left underequipped at apprehending how she is seen.
It's a sensitively and subtley written novel that can make such an exchange a spoiler, a surprise that is dishearteningly confirmed later:
"Presently Fraulein laid her gloved hand on Miriam's gloved one. "You and I have, I think, much in common."
Believe it or not, this shocks, and it does so more realistically than any adventure, morality tale, or romance, no matter how transparently rendered.
Now whether or not this is as fun depends upon your tastes. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I would not want all books to be like this.
Dorothy Richardson was a modernist. Virginia Woolf was a modernist. Therefore Virginia Woolf was Dorothy Richardson. This would be plain before everyone's eyes, but not everyone has the same eyes.
"They had dreadful eyes--eyes like the eyes of hostesses..."
By using those eyes to absorb this text you will gain access to forgotten areas of your past, such as when you had to leave the warmth and familiarity of your home to take a job overseas as a governness at a girls' school. On the eve of your departure, your sadness suffused every sense with a delicate attunement to everything around you, especially your sister's tears.
It's time for a makeover, Miriam Henderson.
"They performed an uproarious toilet."
So begins a long sojourn of self-discovery, self-creation, and a multi-volume literary selfie.
Literally hundreds of billions of books have been written about protagonists who are special, who are aware they are not like everyone else, whose disdain for false notions and fake people forms an idiosyncratic worldview. The writer of such a book then has a mighty task: to convince you, the reader, that you are also such a person and that is why you identify with the protagonist. The writer must also shield from your mind the idea that, statistically, you likely are not actually this special, that the book has crowds of readers who feel the same empathetic identification you do, perhaps even with better reason. While the feeling each of us cherishes regarding our individual uniqueness is easy enough to access for a competent writer, it's a harder trick to create a character who boasts the oxymoron of being equally unique without alienating all the other readers but you, or alienating you while engaging others. And there's such a fine line between engaging and ingratiating, isn't there?
So it seems to me that the writer of this sort of protagonist is better off neglecting attractive particulars of character and betting on the power of a true portrait. I don't mean true in the sense of factual; I mean an immersion of the character in a completeness of experience, a consistent relationship with the day-to-day of the sensual, the psychological, and the social. This book sacrifices many of the conventions we expect of novels toward this end.
So what happens? Given the set-up, there is a handful of plots to anticipate: Miriam goes off to teach at a foreign school where secrets are held and there is something sinister to discover; Miriam leaves home for a strange land where she is seduced and abandoned and she must struggle to avoid ruin; she arrives in a new place to meet a handsome but unavailable man and they must overcome obstacles to fulfill their romance (there may even be an alternate man who is unappealing but more "correct" for reasons like class, nationality, family wishes, etc.).
Spoiler: none of these things happen. Not a spoiler: really, these things usually do not happen. Spoiler: the ideology of modernism is actually sometimes realism, despite what Wikipedia says:
"Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism."
I believe one should always go with a James Joyce quote over Wikipedia:
"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead prose."
It seems to me that this is not a rejection of realism but a more ambitious version of it, going for portrayal of that "great part of every human existence" which has been unrealistically excluded from supposed realistic novels.
So rather than unrealistically hinging on a mysterious secret, a pitiable downfall, or a forbidden romance, this novel's realistic crux is the simple smile.
Miriam does not smile enough.
"They would be so affable at first. She had been through it a million times—all her life—all eternity. They would smile those hateful women's smiles—smirks—self-satisfied smiles as if everybody were agreed about everything. She loathed women. They always smiled."
Ok, so it's not just smiles, but what they signal for Miriam about shallowness of personality and social niceties.
"Then as she watched their faces as they sang she felt that she knew all these women, the way, with little personal differences, they would talk, the way they would smile and take things for granted."
And it isn't just about social superficialities, but larger things (oh, and men, too):
"those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair."
As she adjusts to life at this new school, Miram is torn between the human desire for belonging, fitting in, and her disdain for superficial unserious people. She resents the pressure to become one or at least act like one. To be ingratiating and pleasant is distinctly unpleasant for Miriam. From clothing (lots of clothing details) to daily habits to accents to (especially) attitude, Miriam is constantly reminded of her difference, so while the book delivers a comprehensive fullness of day-to-day detail, it is by way of this that we inhabit Miriam's mind in her every reaction. But this does lead her to ponder whether her unusual quality is due to her upbringing, her schooling, or something deeper, more essential:
"If she had been brought up differently, it could not, she felt sure, have made her very different—for long—nor taught her to be affable—to smile that smile she hated so."
So it seems: it's just her.
And, quite realistically, being immersed in our own self-perception allows in only a few trickles of clues as to how others perceive us. Miriam is slow to gauge these and--when it becomes important--is left underequipped at apprehending how she is seen.
It's a sensitively and subtley written novel that can make such an exchange a spoiler, a surprise that is dishearteningly confirmed later:
"Presently Fraulein laid her gloved hand on Miriam's gloved one. "You and I have, I think, much in common."
Believe it or not, this shocks, and it does so more realistically than any adventure, morality tale, or romance, no matter how transparently rendered.
Now whether or not this is as fun depends upon your tastes. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I would not want all books to be like this.
March 7, 2012
I can't believe I deserted this the first time I attempted it.
I can't believe it sat on my shelf for so long when it has everything I love: reverie, poignant simplicity, rustling leaves and hearthside warmth. This is a book like moonlight.
From now on, I only want to read books just like this one. *nods*
I did have some trouble with all the untranslated French and German. But, again, that's really more a criticism of me...
I can't believe it sat on my shelf for so long when it has everything I love: reverie, poignant simplicity, rustling leaves and hearthside warmth. This is a book like moonlight.
From now on, I only want to read books just like this one. *nods*
I did have some trouble with all the untranslated French and German. But, again, that's really more a criticism of me...
February 8, 2025
4.5
More interesting than Proust. Looking forward to the next 12 volumes.
They are often compared and (for a while) wrote and published around the same time. But it's striking how Richardson and her protagonist are, unlike Proust and his protagonist, not at all focussed on or even much interested in the past. Richardson's novel lives almost completely in the present, it's almost all observations and reflections on what's right before the narrator's eyes. It's very, very visual. The few recollections are tokens of acute homesickness and not part of an overarching nostalgia. Reading Proust can feel like wading through stagnant molasses, here everything moves forward.
They're interested in similar things though, mainly the fabric and the hierarchies of social connections and societal spheres. It's striking though how Proust needs or allows himself 400 pages of a single soirée at the Guermantes to analyze these themes, complete with genealogical treatises on each person, whereas Richardson only needs a few sitting room vignettes from a school for governesses, with no background given for the other characters, just vibes and impressions, to achieve the same effect.
I'm not saying it's better, that would be a ludicrous claim, just that it's more interesting to me.
More interesting than Proust. Looking forward to the next 12 volumes.
They are often compared and (for a while) wrote and published around the same time. But it's striking how Richardson and her protagonist are, unlike Proust and his protagonist, not at all focussed on or even much interested in the past. Richardson's novel lives almost completely in the present, it's almost all observations and reflections on what's right before the narrator's eyes. It's very, very visual. The few recollections are tokens of acute homesickness and not part of an overarching nostalgia. Reading Proust can feel like wading through stagnant molasses, here everything moves forward.
They're interested in similar things though, mainly the fabric and the hierarchies of social connections and societal spheres. It's striking though how Proust needs or allows himself 400 pages of a single soirée at the Guermantes to analyze these themes, complete with genealogical treatises on each person, whereas Richardson only needs a few sitting room vignettes from a school for governesses, with no background given for the other characters, just vibes and impressions, to achieve the same effect.
I'm not saying it's better, that would be a ludicrous claim, just that it's more interesting to me.
January 16, 2015
I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t blown away. I recognize her trailblazing use of stream of consciousness, but there wasn’t enough there there for me. Richardson is quite adept at portraying the gyrating opinions in a state of consternation, or even contemplation, but in retrospect I’m not totally at ease with her approach to switching back and forth between stream of consciousness and straight narration. Keeping in mind that Miriam is just 17 or 18 years old here, and Richardson is experimenting with a new way of writing, I will probably persevere for at least one more volume to see where she goes.
January 4, 2015
This first volume from Richardson's 13-volume 'Pilgrimage' introduces us to Miriam. Told mostly through Miriam's inner monologue and subjective observations, we follow her transition from daughter in England to governess at a girl's school in Germany. Self-conscious and unsure, Miriam's emotions ebb and flow from moment to moment, at times in the present, others spent briefly in the past, we "know" her only as well as she tries to know herself. An interesting expedition into the thoughts and feelings of a young woman beginning her adult life.
March 20, 2016
(I had taken some notes while reading this first volume, and layered in some retroactive thoughts while reading the second. I had planned on reading and reviewing all volumes together, but 2000 pages is a lot, especially when I was out of town bar hopping a lot. I'll need to come back to the series later. I doubt I'll re-read this first volume though, so I'm going to post what I've got here, even though it's incomplete)
These opening three books serve as a sort of prologue for Pilgrimage - they are more simplistic and orderly than the books about her move to London. This is not to take away from the novels here - they are all excellent in their own right, but these first three novels, with their focuses on the three governess jobs with which Miriam was employed all serve as lead up to her move to London (in book 4) and the independence that it offered. Much as her opportunities and horizons opened with that move, the narration and open streams of thought expand greatly after these books.
Even that said, Miriam is a singular character, with a district, focused, point of view; from the first novel she brings a distinctly feminist viewpoint to the education of young women - especially when education is primarily focused less on the acquisition of knowledge and more on the making of a wife - as well as an atheistic viewpoint of religious practices in late 19th century Germany and England.
An exceptional beginning to a (so far) rewarding "novel".
Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase wasThat's the paragraph that opens the entire Pilgrimage cycle. I point it out up front, as it - possibly unintentionally (it's difficult to ascribe intent to a series of books that would span decades) - hits some major themes of the novel (Richardson considered Pilgrimage to be one novel, and the thirteen books which compose it to be merely chapters). There are three points of repetition in this opening paragraph: darkness, silence/quiet; and internal thought. For a novel cycle that would focus so heavily on the internal monologue, on the singular focus of only one psyche, these opening repetitions would frame the focus of the following novel. Again, this could be intentional, or it could just be a byproduct of the internality of the single point of view as presented throughout the novels.
almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent. There was no one about. It would be quiet in her room. She could sit by the fire and be quiet and think things over until Eve and Harriett came back with the parcels. She would have time to think about the journey and decide what she was going to say to the Fräulein.
These opening three books serve as a sort of prologue for Pilgrimage - they are more simplistic and orderly than the books about her move to London. This is not to take away from the novels here - they are all excellent in their own right, but these first three novels, with their focuses on the three governess jobs with which Miriam was employed all serve as lead up to her move to London (in book 4) and the independence that it offered. Much as her opportunities and horizons opened with that move, the narration and open streams of thought expand greatly after these books.
Even that said, Miriam is a singular character, with a district, focused, point of view; from the first novel she brings a distinctly feminist viewpoint to the education of young women - especially when education is primarily focused less on the acquisition of knowledge and more on the making of a wife - as well as an atheistic viewpoint of religious practices in late 19th century Germany and England.
An exceptional beginning to a (so far) rewarding "novel".
Miriam seemed to gaze long at a pallid, rounded man with smiling eyes. She saw a garden and fields, a firelit interior, a little woman smiling and busy and agreeable moving quickly about .... and Pastor Lahmann--presiding. It filled her with fury to be regarded as one of a world of little tame things to be summoned by little man to be well-willed wives. She must make him see that she did not even recognize such a thing as ‘ a well-willed wife.’
March 19, 2023
Giving all these books five stars is a bit of an eccentricity, perhaps; few if any would regard all of them as being anything remotely like perfectly realized. The author herself probably would have conceded that the first novel has executed its intention more successfully than any of its successors. But Richardson is unfairly neglected, and reading her was one of the most enjoyable literary experiences I have had, so for that I am giving them all fives.
UPDATE: Revisiting this review, I'm surprised at the hesitancy that I expressed here. These are classics of high modernism, and should be recognized as such, without reservation. The issue of "realization" is not truly relevant, because these novels are processual in their formal concept. They are about extending an event of insight, tracing its tendrils into the succeeding period of time. As such, they are perfectly realized.
UPDATE: Revisiting this review, I'm surprised at the hesitancy that I expressed here. These are classics of high modernism, and should be recognized as such, without reservation. The issue of "realization" is not truly relevant, because these novels are processual in their formal concept. They are about extending an event of insight, tracing its tendrils into the succeeding period of time. As such, they are perfectly realized.
February 26, 2020
A snow day gifted the time to complete this, reading steadily in my bright, quiet family room, or saal, as Richardson had me imagining it.
wish-list
January 11, 2015Should be 'rooves'.
July 11, 2016
Ever heard of Virginia Woolf? No doubt you have. But have you ever heard of Dorothy M. Richardson? Maybe not.
I for one hadn't heard of her until just recently, yet Woolf undoubtedly owed her a debt of style, for Richardson it was who first introduced the "stream of consciousness" narrative technique to the Bloomsbury set in her ongoing series of semi-autobiographical novels entitled Pilgrimage.
Pointed Roofs is the first book of that series, in which Richardson's literary surrogate, Miriam Henderson, decides to leave her faltering middle-class home in London and undertake to teach english to a small group of German girls just outside Hanover.
Not yet eighteen herself, reserved yet rebellious by nature, Miriam can hardly speak a word of German and has no idea how to plan a lesson. Understandably she's a bundle of nerves and insecurities.
Her insights into the comparisons between her own schooling and upbringing to those of her German pupils are fascinating, both favourable and unfavourable. Either way she noticed the differences:
'They did not seem to be in the least afraid of the future. Their eyes and their hands were serene.'
Miriam's thoughts laid bare are often far from generous, particularly towards religion, her roommate Mademoiselle the the French teacher, or indeed to her sex in general:
'people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting ... those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles ... just as insincere at any rate ...'
Furthermore, when she ponders her very reasons for leaving home in the first place she grows homesick and admits that 'she had run away, proud of herself, despising them all, and had turned herself into Miss Henderson.'
There is no question that this was a very new kind of novel for its time, not just in a narrative sense but also with regards the brutal honesty of the narrator. I can well imagine the bemusement, even dislike with which a lot of women readers may have had for it, while a few others - such as Woolf - would have identified both a kindred spirit and a literary inspiration.
Tentative at first, within the final fifty pages or so are contained a veritable mini-orgy of nascent interior monologuing on all manor of things, great and small, from such as this example:
'No God. No Creation. The struggle for existence. Fighting ... Fighting ...Fighting. Everybody groping and fighting ... Fraulein ... Some said it was true ... some not. They could not both be right. It was probably true ... only old-fashioned people thought it was not. It was true. Just that - monkeys fighting. But who began it? Who made Fraulein? Tough leathery monkey.'
Not just a seminal modernist novel, an interesting read too.
I for one hadn't heard of her until just recently, yet Woolf undoubtedly owed her a debt of style, for Richardson it was who first introduced the "stream of consciousness" narrative technique to the Bloomsbury set in her ongoing series of semi-autobiographical novels entitled Pilgrimage.
Pointed Roofs is the first book of that series, in which Richardson's literary surrogate, Miriam Henderson, decides to leave her faltering middle-class home in London and undertake to teach english to a small group of German girls just outside Hanover.
Not yet eighteen herself, reserved yet rebellious by nature, Miriam can hardly speak a word of German and has no idea how to plan a lesson. Understandably she's a bundle of nerves and insecurities.
Her insights into the comparisons between her own schooling and upbringing to those of her German pupils are fascinating, both favourable and unfavourable. Either way she noticed the differences:
'They did not seem to be in the least afraid of the future. Their eyes and their hands were serene.'
Miriam's thoughts laid bare are often far from generous, particularly towards religion, her roommate Mademoiselle the the French teacher, or indeed to her sex in general:
'people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting ... those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles ... just as insincere at any rate ...'
Furthermore, when she ponders her very reasons for leaving home in the first place she grows homesick and admits that 'she had run away, proud of herself, despising them all, and had turned herself into Miss Henderson.'
There is no question that this was a very new kind of novel for its time, not just in a narrative sense but also with regards the brutal honesty of the narrator. I can well imagine the bemusement, even dislike with which a lot of women readers may have had for it, while a few others - such as Woolf - would have identified both a kindred spirit and a literary inspiration.
Tentative at first, within the final fifty pages or so are contained a veritable mini-orgy of nascent interior monologuing on all manor of things, great and small, from such as this example:
'No God. No Creation. The struggle for existence. Fighting ... Fighting ...Fighting. Everybody groping and fighting ... Fraulein ... Some said it was true ... some not. They could not both be right. It was probably true ... only old-fashioned people thought it was not. It was true. Just that - monkeys fighting. But who began it? Who made Fraulein? Tough leathery monkey.'
Not just a seminal modernist novel, an interesting read too.
January 26, 2022
Alas, it didn't take long for me to feel underwhelmed. Wikipedia also states that Richardson (1873-1957), is also considered an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. I try not to be disloyal to the Sisterhood but while I agree that any experiences can be a subject for literature, they must be rendered sufficiently interesting to maintain the attention of the reader. I could not muster the slightest interest in Miriam Henderson and the petty dramas of the German boarding-school where she becomes a governess.
Yes, I was bored by Pointed Roofs.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/01/26/p...
Yes, I was bored by Pointed Roofs.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/01/26/p...
November 15, 2012
Finished Pointed Roofs, which details Miriam's time in a german school. The attitude of the staff and the various groups of students is interesting, though at times things seemed to be hinted at, ie Mademoiselle and the letters.
Backwater, Miriam now teaches in a school in London, but you get the idea that she sees herself as above the other teachers and pupils socially. Part of her dreads returning there, the other part looks forward to seeing the girls and teachers.
Honeycomb, moves on Miriam's life to a new situation as a governess, though her position within the house seems to hint that she's caught between the upstairs and downstairs. Miriam also keeps the reader informed as to her family position and the effect this has on her.
Backwater, Miriam now teaches in a school in London, but you get the idea that she sees herself as above the other teachers and pupils socially. Part of her dreads returning there, the other part looks forward to seeing the girls and teachers.
Honeycomb, moves on Miriam's life to a new situation as a governess, though her position within the house seems to hint that she's caught between the upstairs and downstairs. Miriam also keeps the reader informed as to her family position and the effect this has on her.
May 23, 2023
According to J. D. BERESFORD, I have read “Pointed Roofs” three times.
This is my second time and I really liked it.
Free download available at Project Gutenberg.
This is the first book of a series of 13 books. To be followed.
This is my second time and I really liked it.
Free download available at Project Gutenberg.
This is the first book of a series of 13 books. To be followed.
September 4, 2021
Beautiful writing style, some gorgeous passages of free indirect speech, lesbian subtext, but I COULD NOT STOP FALLING ASLEEP
September 28, 2022
A reputation for exhibiting early stream-of-consciousness is only shown in brief sections, leading one to understand why Richardson was apparently unenthused by the usage of the term to describe her work. What she seems to be doing (at least in this first installment) is something adjacent, creating distinctively subjective views of moments, untethered to narrative through-lines. There is a broader sense of time's linear progress, but section to section the novel is literary snapshots like free-floating reminiscences of a life lived, nearly all unfettered by any sense of objective meaning, pragmatic narrative purpose, or conventional "novelistic" intent.
This first section of Pilgrimage has a strong psychological insight regarding familiar youthful feelings of inadequacy as they arise from being plopped into unfamiliar environments populated by unfamiliar individuals. But Richardson also displays an artfully observant eye and an admirably anti-authoritarian sensibility, particularly in relation to religion. I would be lying if I said I was as taken by all of this as I expected to be from Richardon's reputation -- as such I will continue onward, eventually but not immediately.
This first section of Pilgrimage has a strong psychological insight regarding familiar youthful feelings of inadequacy as they arise from being plopped into unfamiliar environments populated by unfamiliar individuals. But Richardson also displays an artfully observant eye and an admirably anti-authoritarian sensibility, particularly in relation to religion. I would be lying if I said I was as taken by all of this as I expected to be from Richardon's reputation -- as such I will continue onward, eventually but not immediately.
October 8, 2023
This is such a wonderful volume. It reminds me a bit of a combination of those boarding school books by Enid Blyton mixed with Charlotte Brontë's Villette, and stylistically, it's very much a predecessor to authors like Virginia Woolf. All good things! Miriam is a lovely, spirited protagonist and I found it really interesting to follow her thoughts. Some of the other characters aren't quite fully fleshed out, but I honestly thought that worked really well as it helps immerse you in Miriam's perspective: all you know is what she knows. I found it fascinating to see Miriam grow over the course of these three books (or chapters, as Richardson herself referred to them) and become more settled into her own skin. And the prose... I know stream-of-consciousness as a term was first applied to Richardson's work, and though Richardson apparently was not a fan of that description, I can't help but find it the only one that fits. We meander through Miriam's thoughts, moving from detailed descriptions to her worries to conversations with others. There's just something so lovely about it all! I cannot wait to pick up the next volume.
Read
October 6, 2021My first encounter with Dorothy Richardson was in a Senior English majors' seminar at a liberal arts college in Middle America (read: group therapy session for the miserable and blotchy-skinned, of both the booze- and theory-laden variety and the Warhammer figurine-painting variety), where my thesis advisor, a delightful old bat with a patchouli-reeking office (natch) introduced us all to the by that point completely out of print D.R. I recall being at the very least interested in The Tunnel, if not totally wowed. With Pointed Roofs as well, it feels like the puzzle piece of something much bigger, something Proustian in scope. So it's hard to evaluate as an individual set piece, and I don't know how up to the task of reading the entirety of Pilgrimage I am. But I'll say this at least: "intriguing."
September 9, 2024
A very well written, interesting stream of consciousness (internal monologues) writing style about Miriam, a young English girl who travels to Germany to teach English at a German girls school. Miriam is unsure of herself, lacking in confidence and it is provided with little feedback on how she is progressing as an English teacher. It is a character based novel that effectively portrays a young woman’s feelings and self doubts. The author vividly describes the new environment Miriam enters and her perceptions of the various characters she meets and the differences in the German culture when compared to her English upbringing.
This book was first published in 1915 and was the first novel published in the ‘stream of consciousness’ style. This novel is the first in Richardson’s 13 book series titled ‘Pilgrimage’.
This book was first published in 1915 and was the first novel published in the ‘stream of consciousness’ style. This novel is the first in Richardson’s 13 book series titled ‘Pilgrimage’.
Read
March 28, 2020As a pioneering text in stream-of-consciousness narration, it is interesting. I don’t find Miriam Henderson, the principal consciousness, as interesting as the method used to portray her. However, on this second reading, nearly 30 years after the first, I find myself more engaged than on the initial reading. I can, at least, understand more of why so much of the chaos of her experience is important to this young woman, even if it still doesn’t seem so important to me and I still want to tell her to “smarten up” more than once.
July 30, 2014
I forgot that stream-of-consciousness was not my thing and nearly lost consciousness altogether whilst enduring this tedium. It may well be great literature, but I am not an objective reader.
November 29, 2016
guess who got all 13novels for their birthday aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
April 15, 2020
Pilgrimage 1 contains three “chapters” as Richardson called the separate volumes of her epic multi-volume novel Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs, Backwater & Honeycomb. It tracks, at times minutely, the thoughts, sensations, ideas, feelings that pass through the mind of Miriam Henderson or rather is a protocol / portrait of her consciousness and its development over three years, starting with 17-year Miriam leaving her family in England to work a an English teacher in a girl school in Hannover. Richardson tracks how Miriam is working her way out of the constraints of her family (always living in fear that their financial difficulties ruin their ‘respectability’) And larger societal constraints regarding women of her class and women in general. Highly lyrical passages reflecting her perception of natural and musical phenomena and art alternate with often very caustic or aggressive musings about societal norms, class and especially gender issues - and her interactions with her sisters, friends, pupils, parents (especially her mother), her employers, servants etc. Being enclosed in the mind of a very intelligent and perceptive girl / young woman of around 1900 is not always an entertaining experience, at least for me, and you have to get used to it, but Richardson’s mastery of voice and coherent point of experience (so to speak) is absolutely marvellous - this really is the mother of all modernist stream of consciousness novels, even of the idea of trying to recreate this stream as a narrative form and a style of writing. Richardson should be up there with Woolf and Joyce in the modern canon. (If your History of Modern Literature Text books doesn’t contain Pilgrimage it’s crap, pure & simple.) The last 10 pages of Honeycomb tracking Miriam’s experience of her mother’s decent into madness and suicide are one of the marvels of modern prose - and very, very touching .
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 8, 2018
Mary Olivier, a Life was such an extraordinary experience, I had to find out more about the 'stream of consciousness' method, first by actually reading through May Sinclair's essay that made the use of the term famous in 1918, in the journal The Egoist, all issues of which are available online. Sinclair says Richardson plunges deep into reality, in the tradition of French writing by the de Goncourts brothers and Marie Claire, and of course Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The main thing was to hold her voice to the expression only of main character Miriam's fragmentary views, eschewing the role of the all-knowing Author; part of this game, it seems, was to let go, too, of drama and scene and character as such. "It is just life going on and on. It is Miram Henderson's stream of consciousness going on and on."
Not that the writing is formless; Richardson is a master of the image, showing us intense joy in the use of the senses, as when depicting human figures, landscapes, or interiors:
These extended sentences of description are worth pulling out and examining, endlessly, to writers who care to cultivate their craft.
And there is, after all, conflict and drama; it's just that it has to be deduced -- Fraulein Pfaff is more sensual than she lets on, and Pastor Lahmann does evidently enjoy Miriam's company, and he, hers.
Sinclair makes the point that Richardson enables us readers to capture Miriam's joy in the experience of life, despite its evident meaninglessness. There is a substantial, a thing...life and its force? The very love of it all? that dwells alongside Miriam, even as she chews her bread, and that will not allow sorrow to blot it out.
There is, in such hyperrealism, a mystical answer to the dilemma of absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism that so dominates the work of Beckett and Pinter and so forth. It is the hard-nosed attention to reason and feeling within, the generating motor of the sentences and brushstrokes of art. Some of this centeredness is the result of opposing things; intelligent women, opposing patriarchy automatically, have perhaps an early channel into the center. My favorite part of Pointed Roofs is a bit of writing against religion, reminiscent of very similar passages in Mary Olivier: A Life, and of course hinting at the proto-feminist pantheism of Emily Dickinson, captured so artfully throughout the film A Quiet Passion.
Not that the writing is formless; Richardson is a master of the image, showing us intense joy in the use of the senses, as when depicting human figures, landscapes, or interiors:
Mademoiselle, preceding her up through the quiet house carrying the jugs of hot water, had been her first impression on her arrival the previous night. She had turned when they reached the candle-lit attic with its high uncurtained windows and red-covered box beds, and standing on the one strip of matting in her full-skirted grey wincey dress with its neat triple row of black ribbon velvet near the hem, had shown Miriam steel-blue eyes smiling from a little triangular sprite-like face under a high-standing pouf of soft dark hair, and said, “Voila!” Miriam had never imagined anything in the least like her. She had said, “Oh, thank you,” and taken the jug and had hurriedly and silently got to bed, weighed down by wonders. They had begun to talk in the dark. Miriam had reaped sweet comfort in learning that this seemingly unreal creature who was, she soon perceived, not educated—as she understood education—was the resident French governess, was seventeen years old and a Protestant. Such close quarters with a French girl was bewildering enough—had she been a Roman Catholic, Miriam felt she could not have endured her proximity. She was evidently a special kind of French girl—a Protestant from East France—Besanon—Besanon—Miriam had tried the pretty word over until unexpectedly she had fallen asleep.
These extended sentences of description are worth pulling out and examining, endlessly, to writers who care to cultivate their craft.
And there is, after all, conflict and drama; it's just that it has to be deduced -- Fraulein Pfaff is more sensual than she lets on, and Pastor Lahmann does evidently enjoy Miriam's company, and he, hers.
Sinclair makes the point that Richardson enables us readers to capture Miriam's joy in the experience of life, despite its evident meaninglessness. There is a substantial, a thing...life and its force? The very love of it all? that dwells alongside Miriam, even as she chews her bread, and that will not allow sorrow to blot it out.
There is, in such hyperrealism, a mystical answer to the dilemma of absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism that so dominates the work of Beckett and Pinter and so forth. It is the hard-nosed attention to reason and feeling within, the generating motor of the sentences and brushstrokes of art. Some of this centeredness is the result of opposing things; intelligent women, opposing patriarchy automatically, have perhaps an early channel into the center. My favorite part of Pointed Roofs is a bit of writing against religion, reminiscent of very similar passages in Mary Olivier: A Life, and of course hinting at the proto-feminist pantheism of Emily Dickinson, captured so artfully throughout the film A Quiet Passion.
She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come—running—she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church—working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong—all wrong. It couldn’t be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good—even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile—and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men’s sermons were worse than women’s smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on from unsound premises until your brain was sick... droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic... and nothing behind it. As often as not you could pick out the logical fallacy if you took the trouble.... Preachers knew no more than anyone else... you could see by their faces... sheeps’ faces.... What a terrible life... and wives and children in the homes taking them for granted....
October 26, 2025
"Did you guys like reading about Miriam Henderson?" my professor asked. Silence from the class. "Would you guys read 12 more books about Miriam Henderson?" Emphatic "no!"s all around.
a pioneering modernist / stream-of-consciousness novel. some lesbian-coded bits to delight at, also feminist for its dedication to making feminine life the subject of art (think a literary jeanne dielman). but there's a reason why richardson has fallen into critical and commerical obscurity and it's because her writing is rly freaking boring. for lyricism and insight that keeps the stream-of-consciousness from turning into sleep-inducing slush... go read virginia woolf instead
a pioneering modernist / stream-of-consciousness novel. some lesbian-coded bits to delight at, also feminist for its dedication to making feminine life the subject of art (think a literary jeanne dielman). but there's a reason why richardson has fallen into critical and commerical obscurity and it's because her writing is rly freaking boring. for lyricism and insight that keeps the stream-of-consciousness from turning into sleep-inducing slush... go read virginia woolf instead
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