Pilgrimage 2

Pilgrimage #4-5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

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.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Literature, British Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

Dorothy 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/...

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The wonders of science for women are nothing but gynaecology... all those frightful operations in the British Medical Journal and those jokes - the hundred golden rules... Sacred functions... highest possibilities... sacred for what? The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world? The Future of the Race? What world? What race? Men... Nothing but men; forever.

In volumes four and five of Pilgrimages we can see Richardson's writing style get both more confident and closer to what we usually mean by stream of consciousness. Everything is via Miriam's perspective still but we also get these switches into her mind, where the narrative goes from 'she' to 'I' with a smooth refusal to mark the change.

In terms of 'plot', what little formal plot there is, Miriam is settled into a frugal but independent existence in London. She has a room in a boarding house on the outskirts of Bloomsbury but, importantly, she has made friends, especially with the joyful Mag and Jan. Working as a secretary/administrator in a dentists' surgery may not pay richly but Miriam has some level of control over her days and feel dependent on no-one - and I was struck by this probably being one of the most detailed descriptions of a working woman in this period as we feel the rush of activity and the pressure on Miriam to keep her male professional colleagues in order.

Following an earlier volume where Miriam started reading newspapers and taking an interest in politics, here she goes to lectures, concerts and the theatre, participating in the ferment of new ideas the city throws up. I especially love her internal rants about patriarchy as seen in the quotation at the head of this review and when she, exasperated, wishes it were possible that 'by one thought all the men in the world could be stopped, shaken, slapped'. It's less edifying to see Miriam's musings on the gap between 'civilised' and 'colonials and primitive races' when fantasising about women's revenge: 'It will all go on as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into the world... even if civilised women stop, the colonials and primitive races would go on. It's a nightmare.' Hmm.

There are times when Miriam feels lonely, lost, hopeless but something about London energises her and she picks herself up again. The other significant event in this volume is the meeting with Hypo G. Wilson, a version of HG Wells with whom Richardson had an affair, married to Miriam's old schoolfriend. It is Wilson who plants the idea of her writing, though there is little development in either of these directions in this volume, hopefully they will emerge in the later books.

The significance of this sequence for me resides in Richardson's evolving modernist style and her insistence on making an ordinary woman, albeit one who creates a life of some independence at a time when that was not usual, the centre of her own world.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the first few pages - her technique has already developed and progressed from Honeycomb - look at how she moves from third to first person

"When she turned out the gas the window spaces remained faintly alight with a soft light like moonlight. At the window she found a soft bluish radiance cast up from below upon the opposite walls and windows. It went up into the clear blue darkness of the sky. When she lay down the bed smelt faintly of dust. The air about her head under the sharply sloping ceiling was still a little warm with the gas. It was full of her untrammelled thoughts. Her luggage was lying about, quite near. She thought of washing in the morning in the bright light on the other side of the room . . . leaves crowding all round the lattice and here and there a pink rose . . . several pink roses ... the lovely air chilling the water . . . the basin quite up against the lattice . . . dew splashing off the rose bushes in the little garden almost dark with trellises and trees, crowding with Harriett through the little damp stiff gate, the sudden lineny smell of Harriett's pinafore and the thought of Harriett in it, feeling the same, sudden bright sunshine, two shouts, great cornfields going up and up with a little track between them ... up over Blew-burton . . . Whittenham Clumps. Before I saw Whittenham Clumps I had always known them. But we saw them before we knew they were called Whittenham Clumps. It was a surprise to know anybody who had seen them and that they had a name."

I think what moves me, and impresses me, most about the novel so far is the honesty and openness of her attempt to render experience/life in prose - her willingness to detail all the youthful idiocies of thought, all the confusions, all the anxieties, the awkwardness...And this allow us to truly get the sense of a mind growing and developing - in particular her wrestling with the position of women as we shift from the 19th century to the 20th - there is much here that reads like a precursor to Woolf's Room - Miriam even goes through that exact struggle herself...

DR's style and the complexity of her writing is increasing as we move through the sequence - it is not a difficult read by any means (though I can imagine it was when these books were published almost 100 years ago) - it moves fast and (despite the beauty of much of the writing) is not a text that requires slow lingering over. But it is wonderful wonderful stuff.

What is particularly interesting is that there are significant differences between the original text of 1919 and the modified version published in the 1930's - DR was heavily criticised for her punctuation (or lack of) and her experimentation with prose and essentially went back through these two books and inserted commas etc to make them more readable. From what I can see of the originals, I wish she had not done so!.

For example, look at this piece of text from the original version, which I think could almost have been written by William Gaddis:



"I can see Grace – she drove on carrying them with her, ignoring the swift eyes upon the dim things settling heavily upon her heart – gazing out of the window in the little room where I was supposed to be holding a German class – Yes I know Miriam darling, but now you know me you know I could never be good at languages – – You’re my pupil – – It seems absurd to think of you as a teacher now we know you chuckled Florrie."

Now that is just great stuff...I have tracked down a not insanely overpriced first edition of Interim and will report back once I have been able to read and compare...

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here comes one of my unfinished rambling non-reviews: Pilgrimage is the most important work I've ever read in my whole reading life thus far and so it is un-reviewable until I have the chance to really go for it- which is not now during school brain fog time. This is the longest it has taken me to read something I've been so obsessed with- which usually makes me read it really fast. With Richardson I often have to read the same page five times over before moving on. Then I take a photo and read it on my phone again later..... not because it's difficult but because I love it so much and it is just doing everything that I could ever want literature to do and so I think I am trying to absorb that into my being somehow.....

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

All that has been said and known in the world is in language, in words; all we know of Christ is in Jewish words; all the dogmas of religion are words; the meaning of words change with people’s thoughts. Then no one knows anything for certain. Everything depends upon the way a thing is put, and that is a question of some particular civilization. Culture comes through literature, which is a half-truth. People who are not cultured are isolated in barbaric darkness. The Greeks were cultured; but they are barbarians . . . why? Whether you agree or not, language is the only way of expressing anything and it dims everything. So the Bible is not true; it is a culture. Religion is wrong in making word-dogmas out of it. Christ was something. But Christianity which calls Him divine and so on, is false. It clings to words which get more and more wrong . . . then there's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be quite sure of rejoicing about. The Christians are irritating and frightened.

This is an odd series of books to try and review without falling too heavily into repetition. That’s not to say that there is not a great deal of depth here – there is (and I’m going to touch on exactly why that is in a moment), and I’m sure one could write loads of criticism based on what Richardson is doing and the topics she explores; but I’m not trying to write criticism, I’m just trying to briefly cover why these books are excellent and move on.

As noted in my review of volume one, these books contain a massive depth of interiority: Specifically Miriam’s. Pretty much no matter what events are occurring – whether at her clerical job, sitting having tea, writing a letter to her sister, walking the streets of London, tutoring in French – the real action is all in Miriam’s head. Real life basically pales in comparison to her specifically filtered view of real life. It is a very vibrant combination of interior strength, and societal embarrassment, and frustration; there is both fragility as well as a core of independent intellectual strength to Miriam. There is also, in great quantities, an immense depth of rage at societies views of, expectations for, and general dismissals in regards to women; Miriam (/Dorothy Richardson) pulls no punches in her scathing critique of male dominated society, as some of the best passages in these books positively boil with indignant rage. These books ache, and they make me ache when I read them. There is just so much bearing down, the intimate claustrophobia of an other; snippets and fragments and feelings that are familiar and recognizable, but with that there is an alienness that shifts the perspective just enough to put me out of phase. The weight is almost too much at times.

All of that is to say that they are excellent. But, again, I’m not sure how many other ways I’m going to be able to say it if it continues for the next eight books. I might just start picking quotes out and letting them stand alone.

If, by one thought, all the men in the world could be stopped, shaken, and slapped. There must, somewhere, be some power that could avenge it all . . . but if these men were right, there was not. Nothing but Nature and her decrees. Why was nature there? Who started it? If nature ‘ took good care’ this and that . . . there must be somebody. If there was a trick, there must be a trickster. If there is a god who arranged how things should be between men and women, and just let it go and go on I have no respect for him. I should like to give him a piece of my mind . . .

•———————————•

There was nothing to turn to. Books were poisoned. Art. All the achievements of men were poisoned at the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity. The animal world was cruelty. Humanity was based on cruelty. Jests and amusements were tragic distractions from tragedy. Religion was the only hope. But even there there was no hope for women. No future life could heal the degradation of having been a woman. Religion in the world had nothing but insults for women. Christ was a man. If it was true that he was God taking on humanity—he took on male humanity . . . and the people who explained him, St Paul and the priests, the Anglicans and the Nonconformists, it was the same story everywhere. Even if religion could answer science and prove it wrong there was no hope, for women. And no intelligent person can prove science wrong. Life is poisoned, for women, at the very source. Science is true and will find out more and more, and things will grow more and more horrible. Space is full of dead worlds. The world is cooling and dying. Then why not stop now?

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

He had another side; but there was no place in his life which would allow it expression. It could only live in the lives of people met in books; in sympathies here and there for a moment; in people who passed 'like ships in the night'; in moments at the beginning and end of holidays when things would seem real, and as if henceforth they were going to be real every day. If it found expression in his life, it would break up that life.

'Don't judge a book by its cover' is more widely known, but how about don't judge a book by its separations? There are the cases of 2000+ page narratives of both 'The Story of the Stone' and 'Journey to the West' being boiled down into their respective 'Dream of Red Mansions' and 'Monkey', neither meriting more than 500 pages, if that, but with Richardson, there is a different problem. Even when one manages to squeeze in that thirteenth section a good half century or so after the rest had been brought out in full publication, there is the matter of readers thinking, depending on how the work is cut, that they can simply sample the first 'book' and gain all they need to know about the rest of it. It's something I myself have done with series that I chose not to pursue once the first volume was through, but imagine getting through the first 200 pages of 'War and Peace' and figuring that that was good enough. I know there are still others out there who do that, I know, but would they have the gumption to thereon out self-satisfyingly check off the work off of various lists as having been fully indulged in? For 'Pilgrimage' is a self-contained single work even when publishers are unwilling to bring out an edition that renders that more than clear, and if Women and Men, the 16th longest novel via word count in existence ('Pilgrimage' is excluded from Wiki's tally for technically being a 'novel sequence,' as if a reader could pick from its contents willy-nilly à la Trollope and co.), can get one, why not this? For throughout this second volume, composed of the fourth and fifth of Richardson's, as she termed it, chapters, I found myself better understanding the preceding, incipient volume and its share of chapters of the first through third, as well as beginning to recognize that I would not really see the rise and fall and climax that so many readers demand in the space of two to four hundred pages, at best, until I was much closer to the end of the eighth chapter contained in the third volume, or the thirteenth in the fourth. Patience, then, for more of a readerly reward than peer pressure can grant.

'You rate men lower than woman in power to endure pain.'
'They get more practice.'

This is a work that crept up on me, in that I was riding it out till the very end without acknowledging much in terms of dramatic rises or brilliances, until I hit the end and realized I had left more of a trail of folded pieces of ripped up receipts (how I indicate the passages worth returning to) than I had in a single work in a long while. It's a work of transition from the teaching of the former collection of three chapters to a breed of secretarial work, from living alongside children in the varying role of teacher/governess to having a room, a flat if you will, of one's own. There are various circles of friends, various stabilities of relatives, landladies, hanger-ons, fellow lecture attendees, women, men, bicycles, friendship, breakup, thoughts about reading, thoughts about writing, and the intermittent highs and lows that comes with an uncertain relationship between self and money for the long term, which is a potentially wildly devastating style of living for the sensitive mind that I can more than commiserate with. So, freedom to decorate your room to your absolute (as constrained by capitalism, of course), liking, but also freedom to starve in it. I enjoyed the first volume a fraction more due to the novelty of the German living, but this section has the benefit of Miriam undergoing some real development, which makes the text all the more lushly engaging even when, true to form, many of the most major events are sidelined into vague references and summarizing aftermaths. One could argue it to be a true bildungsroman compared to all those other narratives that subsume true portraits of youthful growth for the sake of a plot and circumstance, but I suppose the time hadn't yet come for literature to afford to do that, and when it did, it probably would still have needed to incorporate a great deal more grotesquely abstract violence in its frame in order to pan out well with the critics. A shame, but so it goes.

It was wrong in some way to try and show the things you were looking at. Keep quiet about them. Then somebody else expressed them; and those other people turned to you, and demanded your admiration—and wondered why you were furious.

Especially worthy bits of mention: Villette ("When I've finished it, I begin again."), Mary Augusta Ward, the freedom of the bicycle, a scene of just over two pages where Miriam, coming home to a foodless room late at night after skipping a good portion of the day's meals, fearing to intrude on a front lit restaurant entryway due to the middle class pretension of believing she will not spend enough to justify the employee's unorthodox expenditure of resources, is welcomed, cared for, and never once shamed ("Inside those frightful frosted doors was a home, a bit of her own London home."). There is a Miss Dear that I am sure was a real person, but as she stands in the work as a character, offers a mirror of what could happen to Miriam were her work to evaporate and her circle of acquaintances (often spending the weekends at the homes of her wonderfully domestically blessed sister and/or friends and/or contacts from that long ago excursion to Germany or that position at a North London school) were to grow tired of her exegencies, true or otherwise. There is also a procession of men with their usual foibles and obdurate miscommunications ("But he could not be really happy with a woman unless he could also despise her."), and even the quartet of surprisingly human male doctors introduced during the last fifty or so pages of 'Interim' devolves into patronizing gossip and likely no small amount of antisemitism (Miriam isn't entirely negative in this respect at this point, but I'm still waiting on her to get her head out of her ass). Frightfully boring to many, I imagine, but the intermittent chain of seemingly normal going-ons suddenly sprung upon by a thought or image of absolute brilliance continued well enough for my engagement, and a handful of new characters, along with a sudden interest in the Irish Question at the very tail end of the volume, is promising indeed. I'll still be taking my break from this between now and next month, but I am truly hoping that this new vitality regarding social matters proves to be more of a mainline discussion in the next volume, rather than just a tangentially related remembrance after all is said and done.

Old men seemed to have some sort of understanding of things [...] But the things they said were worldly—generalizations, like the things one read in books that tired you out with trying to find the answer, and made books so awful...things that might look true about everybody at some time or other, and were not really true about anybody—when you knew them. But people liked those things and thought them clever and smiled about them.

So, volume-wise I'm halfway through this work, although it's more like 45% if you go by page count and 38% if you go by chapters. With this book, either you align with it or you don't, and if you were bored ten pages into the first chapter, you're not going to be doing any better if you somehow managed to get to here. It's not like the world really needs another WASP novel, even if it's older than most and written by a woman and does some weird stuff that eventually would consolidate into a movement all its own once the appropriate number of white dudes had gotten their hands on it, but if you're the type to start paying heed when a serious piece of literature runs into the 600k+ word count, you'd be remiss to ignore this one. For me, similar to the first section, this was intensive without actually being much so in that regard, and my intermittent recognition of references such as Ibsen and Roger Elsmere occurred often, yet rarely, enough for me to take pleasure in such slow and steady gleanings. I'm sure it certainly helped that Miriam and I continue to share a number of character traits, but considering how many times I've had to sit inside the head of one obstinate white boy or another for the sake of reading a work of high esteem, I can afford to indulge every so often. So, if you don't mind following the burgeoning complexity of a literary white women who's taken around 900 pages to both get an apartment and start paying attention to politics beyond her usual feminist mutterings, this is the work for you. It takes a while to get into and it's never really apparent when you've started to get anywhere, but there's a certain relaxing sense to it that never gets too ridiculously sentimental or inane, and as the world comes upon its first anniversary of the COVID pandemic, there's not much else once can ask for in one's entertainment.

[Martin Koerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

When alerted to the fact that a book has no 'narrative', two (albeit similar) question arise; 1)Will I want to keep on reading if there's no central narrative thread to pull me through? and 2)Will the lack of drama and events leave me bored?
The answer to question one, as regards Dorothy Richardson, is a very firm Yes. Her writing style- despite my having read in some places about its being difficult- is very easy to read. By this I mean that it is not clunky nor digressive nor intentionally complex; it is mellufluous, thought-provoking, hilarious and beautiful. That is not to say that question two will not arise at some point as you read on, thoroughly enjoying her writing but wondering to yourself 'is this going any where...?' Then suddenly, you get it: This isn't someone simply divulging all their deepest thoughts and telling you what they do from day to day, thoughtlessly and lazily adopting the epistolary form, nor is it its opposite; she isn't experimenting with form to make you admire her writing style. What she has done is attempt to write a psychological novel without pandering to the reader; she parachutes you into siutation after situation without ever explaining what is happening and one has to draw one's own conclusion; a hugely rewarding manner of writing. Authors such as Henry Green, Christine Brooke-Rose and Carole Maso, much later in the 20thC would go on to remove nouns or write with an obstruction, to highlight particular issues with society or with the novel itself, often resulting in admirable but more often 'difficult' novels. Richardson succeeds where others fail. Sure, you need to be open-minded, certainly you need to be able to enjoy the kind of novel in which no one kills anyone, but aside from that, this book is akin to any other novel which seeks to get to the core of human nature but, perhaps, moreso.
In short, she is has created a remarkably readable, extremely enjoyable novel which using an intruging form allows us to see and hear the inner voice with precision, without feeling as if we are reading a novel. Having only read The Tunnel and having just begun Interrim, shie is already one of my favourite authors. She is less stylistically obsessed than Woolf, less digressive than Proust and funnier than both, but I would place her somewhere betwixt the two. It's such a tremendous shame that she is so neglected. Hopefully the upcoming centenary of the first part of this book, and the fact that Oxford appear to be reissuing it (it is, otherwise, a print on demand title and thus pretty hard to find) will see her gradually gain back a reputation which she most certainly deserves. She's fabulous; read her.

[Deanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Tunnel, one of the longer books. Miriam now works at a dental centre, the book reflects her thoughts about life, her family and those around her.
Interim, is just that a short book in which Miriam goes away to a boarding house. There she meets a group of characters including a doctor from Canada. She spends much of her time watching the other people staying at the house. It's interesting to read what she thinks of others and how she feels later in the book to hear their impressions of her.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rtc

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mirian Henderson reflects not only on her life beginning independence from family but also on the way that the Victorian age has changed, and is changing into the future (as unknown as it is.)

[Pip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miriam settles as an independent young woman, working as a dentist's assistant and living in a boarding house. She wrestles with feelings of inadequacy while relishing the opportunity to learn through attending lectures. Sometimes Richardson writes about feelings which absolutely echo thoughts that I might have had, but I felt that there were passages in these volumes which I had trouble identifying with at all. But after finishing The Tunnel I wrote...I love these books. I agree they are like a cosy cup of tea. but I look forward to spending time with Miriam. I recognise a lot of myself in the young Miriam: her social anxiety, her observations of others, her excitement at intellectual activities and her love of reading. I had noted both the quotes Gail has cited, too. I have a young granddaughter working alone in London and I gave her the first two volumes last night. I am looking forward to finding out what she thinks of them. Has anyone got any ideas about why this section is called The Tunnel? Is it because she has built herself a burrow?
I have just finished Interim, and found it harder going. Sometimes I was confused about what was going on. But then there would be a passage where I would recognise something that I had also experienced but never articulated. "She saw herself relinquishing efforts, putting on a desperate animation, professing interests and opinions and talking as people talk, while they watched her with eyes that saw nothing but a pitiful attempt to hide an awful fate, lonely poverty, the absence of any opening prospect, nothing ahead but a gloom deepening as the years wound themselves off".
Or another quote which I loved: "Walking along Oxford Street with a read volume of Ibsen held against you is walking along with something precious between two covers which makes you know you are rich and free". And "...Mrs Bailey was busily thinking behind her voice". These passages make me love Richardson.

[Catie · Rating 4 out of 5]

#PilgrimageTogether group read-along 2022
The Tunnel (April) - 4 Stars
Interim (May) - 4 Stars

[Melon109 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tunnel, book 4 (July 2023)
Interim, book 5 (Nov. 2023)

[May]

I recognize the importance of this novel, and there were parts that were genuinely really funny, but oh my god Miriam is infuriating.