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Pilgrimage #1
Pointed Roofs
Dorothy Richardson was a 20th century British writer who often worked in "stream of consciousness." After she finished school she worked as a teacher, writer and held some clerical positions Her major work was called Pilgrimage. It was a series of books or as she preferred to call them chapters published under separate titles. This included: Pointed Roofs, 1915; Backwater, 1916; Honeycomb, 1917; The Tunnel, 1919; Interim, 1919; Deadlock, 1921; Revolving Lights, 1923; The Trap, 1925; Oberland, 1927; Dawn's Left Hand, 1931; Clear Horizon, 1935; the last part, Dimple Hill, appeared under the collective title, four volumes, 1938). The heroine in Pilgrimage is Miriam Henderson who was an attractive mystical woman. The novel's new look at portraying feminine consciousness gives Richardson's work significant status in the 20th century.
280 pages, Paperback
Published September 11, 2014
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About the author
Dorothy M. Richardson
71 books65 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 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 9, 2025
It made companionship a perpetual question.
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, 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.
January 7, 2016
I was aware of Dorothy Richardson for a long, long time without ever reading her work.
When I was very young and Virago Modern Classics were very new, I remember seeing ‘Pilgrimage’, her thirteen novel series, collected in four thick volumes that had covers that were similar but not quite the same. They looked like important works; the kind of books that I ought to read one day but maybe not quite yet.
Years later, I looked at those four big books again and I learned how very significant Dorothy Richardson had been. That she published the first complete work of stream-of-consciousness fiction, and from that first novel a whole series of autobiographical novels grew, speaking profoundly of the female experience.
It was May Sinclair, who had experimented with writing in a similar form, who described Dorothy Richardson’s style as ‘stream-of-consciousness’, and while I can’t say that it’s wrong I have to believe that there are better words.
To me the word ‘stream’ suggests a rush; and this isn’t a rush, it’s a life being lived. What Dorothy Richardson did in this book is place her readers in her principal character’s position, conveying exactly what she perceived and exactly what she felt. No more and no less
Virginia Woolf, who published her own first novel in the same year as Dorothy Richardson, explained that much more elegantly, praising Richardson for inventing “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender ….. is used to describe a woman’s mind ….”
I collected the four Virago volumes, and the first volume of Pilgrimage was sitting on my bedside table a year or two ago, when I went to hear Louisa Treger speak about Dorothy Richardson and about ‘The Lodger’, her first novel, inspired by the author’s life and writing. She spoke with such erudition and such love that I was inspired. And she reminded me that Dorothy Richardson wrote thirteen novels, not four volumes, and that I could – and maybe should -read them one novel at a time.
A single novel felt so much more approachable that a think omnibus edition; and now that I have read that first novel I have to say that I do hope that some day Pilgrimage will be published as it was written, in thirteen small volumes. Because, though I thought it would be difficult, it wasn’t; it was fascinating to be drawn in, to identify completely, with one woman.
“Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was 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 Fraulein.
Her new Saratoga trunk stood solid and gleaming in the firelight. To-morrow it would be taken away and she would be gone. The room would be altogether Harriett’s. It would never have its old look again. She evaded the thought and moved clumsily to the nearest window. The outline of the round bed and the shapes of the may-trees on either side of the bend of the drive were just visible. There was no escape for her thoughts in this direction. The sense of all she was leaving stirred uncontrollably as she stood looking down into the well-known garden.”
‘Pointed Roofs’, the first of these thirteen novels, opens as Miriam Henderson is leaving home for the first time. She is sensitive to the fact that she is the first to leave, that home life will carry on without her, but she knows that it is time for her to take her first steps out into the world. Because her family’s finances are strained – her mother is in poor health and her father’s business is struggling – she has accepted a job as an English teacher in Fräulein Pfaff’s finishing school in Hanover for German and English girls.
Because she has barely finished her own education, Miriam is concerned about how she will be able to teach, and how she will cope with the questions her students may ask. She finds though that she barely has to teach at all; she is simply expected to read and converse English with the German pupils, and accompanying them on outings and errands. That seems simple, but of course settling into a first job and learning to live with others is never straightforward. There is much in Miriam’s experiences that will strike a chord with anyone who has done those things. Her relief is tempered with disappointment, because she appreciate the very good education that she had received.
Miriam steps out into the world at a time when it was changing rapidly. Fräulein Pfaff, and many of her staff, have traditional views, and see decorum and the making of a good marriage as all important. Her students are a little more modern in their outlook, a little freer in their behaviour, but they still see marriage and motherhood as their future roles. Miriam is a little different. She is uncomfortable in their world; her interests and concerns are quite different from theirs, and so she frequently misunderstands who it going on and fails to pick up on many things that are unsaid; she does know that she is looking for something more from life.
The narrative style highlights all of this. It’s a little like the third person, but it isn’t quite that because it is composed entirely of Miriam’s perceptions. The prose moves quite naturally between her perceptions, her thoughts and her emotions. Her observations are clear and precise, but her thoughts are often more complex, and ellipsis are used to very good effect as she moves between different trains of thought and works through ideas and emotions. There are times when she finds resolutions, but there are also times when she can’t – or maybe won’t.
The story is a little episodic. There is time spent in the classroom, a musical evening, writing letters home on a Saturday, trips out, the school hair-wash, an unexpected chance to play the piano, a trip to the country, a thunderstorm in the night. That well works well with the prose style; each episode feels like a point in a life that might be remembered.
Because I only had Miriam’s perceptions to guide me it sometimes took time to understand what was happening, who all of the characters were, and there were some things that I never come to understand as well as I might have with a more traditional narrative. But coming to understand Miriam – a complex, sensitive, intelligent young woman, just a little ahead of her time – and sharing her world and her life was completely captivating.
I thought reading might be difficult but it wasn’t; and the prose was so lovely and so right that I feel clumsy as I try to write about it.
I was tempted to pick up the next book straight away, to find out where life takes her and how it changes her, but I resisted. I wanted to read ‘Pointed Roofs’ in its centenary year and I did, and now I want to read a book a month this year, to move steadily through Miriam’s life and to appreciate everything that her life and times have to offer.
When I was very young and Virago Modern Classics were very new, I remember seeing ‘Pilgrimage’, her thirteen novel series, collected in four thick volumes that had covers that were similar but not quite the same. They looked like important works; the kind of books that I ought to read one day but maybe not quite yet.
Years later, I looked at those four big books again and I learned how very significant Dorothy Richardson had been. That she published the first complete work of stream-of-consciousness fiction, and from that first novel a whole series of autobiographical novels grew, speaking profoundly of the female experience.
It was May Sinclair, who had experimented with writing in a similar form, who described Dorothy Richardson’s style as ‘stream-of-consciousness’, and while I can’t say that it’s wrong I have to believe that there are better words.
To me the word ‘stream’ suggests a rush; and this isn’t a rush, it’s a life being lived. What Dorothy Richardson did in this book is place her readers in her principal character’s position, conveying exactly what she perceived and exactly what she felt. No more and no less
Virginia Woolf, who published her own first novel in the same year as Dorothy Richardson, explained that much more elegantly, praising Richardson for inventing “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender ….. is used to describe a woman’s mind ….”
I collected the four Virago volumes, and the first volume of Pilgrimage was sitting on my bedside table a year or two ago, when I went to hear Louisa Treger speak about Dorothy Richardson and about ‘The Lodger’, her first novel, inspired by the author’s life and writing. She spoke with such erudition and such love that I was inspired. And she reminded me that Dorothy Richardson wrote thirteen novels, not four volumes, and that I could – and maybe should -read them one novel at a time.
A single novel felt so much more approachable that a think omnibus edition; and now that I have read that first novel I have to say that I do hope that some day Pilgrimage will be published as it was written, in thirteen small volumes. Because, though I thought it would be difficult, it wasn’t; it was fascinating to be drawn in, to identify completely, with one woman.
“Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was 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 Fraulein.
Her new Saratoga trunk stood solid and gleaming in the firelight. To-morrow it would be taken away and she would be gone. The room would be altogether Harriett’s. It would never have its old look again. She evaded the thought and moved clumsily to the nearest window. The outline of the round bed and the shapes of the may-trees on either side of the bend of the drive were just visible. There was no escape for her thoughts in this direction. The sense of all she was leaving stirred uncontrollably as she stood looking down into the well-known garden.”
‘Pointed Roofs’, the first of these thirteen novels, opens as Miriam Henderson is leaving home for the first time. She is sensitive to the fact that she is the first to leave, that home life will carry on without her, but she knows that it is time for her to take her first steps out into the world. Because her family’s finances are strained – her mother is in poor health and her father’s business is struggling – she has accepted a job as an English teacher in Fräulein Pfaff’s finishing school in Hanover for German and English girls.
Because she has barely finished her own education, Miriam is concerned about how she will be able to teach, and how she will cope with the questions her students may ask. She finds though that she barely has to teach at all; she is simply expected to read and converse English with the German pupils, and accompanying them on outings and errands. That seems simple, but of course settling into a first job and learning to live with others is never straightforward. There is much in Miriam’s experiences that will strike a chord with anyone who has done those things. Her relief is tempered with disappointment, because she appreciate the very good education that she had received.
Miriam steps out into the world at a time when it was changing rapidly. Fräulein Pfaff, and many of her staff, have traditional views, and see decorum and the making of a good marriage as all important. Her students are a little more modern in their outlook, a little freer in their behaviour, but they still see marriage and motherhood as their future roles. Miriam is a little different. She is uncomfortable in their world; her interests and concerns are quite different from theirs, and so she frequently misunderstands who it going on and fails to pick up on many things that are unsaid; she does know that she is looking for something more from life.
The narrative style highlights all of this. It’s a little like the third person, but it isn’t quite that because it is composed entirely of Miriam’s perceptions. The prose moves quite naturally between her perceptions, her thoughts and her emotions. Her observations are clear and precise, but her thoughts are often more complex, and ellipsis are used to very good effect as she moves between different trains of thought and works through ideas and emotions. There are times when she finds resolutions, but there are also times when she can’t – or maybe won’t.
The story is a little episodic. There is time spent in the classroom, a musical evening, writing letters home on a Saturday, trips out, the school hair-wash, an unexpected chance to play the piano, a trip to the country, a thunderstorm in the night. That well works well with the prose style; each episode feels like a point in a life that might be remembered.
Because I only had Miriam’s perceptions to guide me it sometimes took time to understand what was happening, who all of the characters were, and there were some things that I never come to understand as well as I might have with a more traditional narrative. But coming to understand Miriam – a complex, sensitive, intelligent young woman, just a little ahead of her time – and sharing her world and her life was completely captivating.
I thought reading might be difficult but it wasn’t; and the prose was so lovely and so right that I feel clumsy as I try to write about it.
I was tempted to pick up the next book straight away, to find out where life takes her and how it changes her, but I resisted. I wanted to read ‘Pointed Roofs’ in its centenary year and I did, and now I want to read a book a month this year, to move steadily through Miriam’s life and to appreciate everything that her life and times have to offer.
November 12, 2025
Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson
10 out of 10
This splendid magnum opus has been included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - in the Family and Friends Section, considered ‘the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English, and it is based on the brilliant author’s own experience, as she has left her home in 1891, at seventeen and because of her father’s financial problems, just like the main character in the book that you can find at https://librivox.org/, where this and multiple other masterpieces are available for free, once they have passed the seventy years copyright limit and they are not entangled in other limitations…Pointed Roofs was published in 1915…
Miriam Henderson is the enchanting main character, an alter ego of the fabulous Dorothy Richardson, the teenager that we meet in the first few pages, as she is contemplating her imminent departure from her home, though she is only seventeen, she would travel to Hanover in Germany, where she would be teaching in a finishing school – learn at the same time, though we might think of one of the frequently used expressions of Harvard Professor Tal Ben- Shahar, who says in his lectures, available online, ‘Learn to Fail, or Fail to learn, which is precisely what the heroine might have to go through, seeing that there are challenges, adversities and even traumas ahead and almost immediately after we see that she is preparing for a transformative, long journey, we are also aware of her fears and the anxiety that is overwhelming her…
She thinks about the future, terrified that she may have to face girls that would be hostile, she may prove inadequate – how do they teach English – she thinks of grammar lessons and then contemplates the alternative of working in a shop – but given her ignorance of the language, how would she be able to communicate, to give change – then there is the idea of being a servant – though the family had been, before the more recent serious financial troubles, if not well off, at least better than average, with elevated preoccupation, a knowledge of music, artistic inclinations and belonging to a ‘better, higher class’…indeed, this aspect would appear throughout, at one point there is the question of sharing a room with a ‘servant’ and that looks like a terrible insult and a humiliation…
When she helps with the soup at one meal, Miriam is embarrassed because she is obviously awkward and unable to maneuver and has to confess that she had never been allowed in the kitchen – expect when they were making the jam – and it is clear for the others and this evidence is expressed that she had lived a rather privileged life…the Fraulein who controls the Hanover finishing school with authority and severity might come to envy her, at least in some stages and this is one the other hand quite a traumatic experience for the progress, accession to higher levels of society comes easy, the descent from a better position to one of approximate poverty is quite painful and the girl preparing to travel to Germany and while there has many moments of gloomy exhortation, declaring herself ‘governessy’ and destined for a hard life…
A dramatic aspect for the main character is her dislike- actually loathing is the word - of women and men – though we could range this in the category of exaggerations and it is surely filtered by a ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, as in the Ingmar Bergman chef d’oeuvre, and once the girl will have passed through this period of adversity, she will have become a strong woman…’what does not kill one, makes her stronger’ to paraphrase – and especially German men might be contemptible, or at the very least undesirable for the protagonist who would be told by one of the girls that ‘she would marry her brother, who is wealthy’
When Miriam Henderson looks at the photos of those relatives, she is almost aghast and this is what happens with those she has seen on the street, in the shops, came in contact with, most seem to have a very different attitude from the English, and when it comes to the teachers, the ones she had had in Britain had been much more accommodating, polite, respectful than the Teutons that appear to despise, disconsider women with a macho, sexist, misogynist attitude towards what they see as their inferiors…
One of the characters that the heroine would meet in Hanover is ‘Mademoiselle, who is seventeen, rather uneducated for the standards of Miriam and Protestant – religion would be an issue and there is a moment when Miriam enters a Catholic Church for the first time and the impact is considerable, she says something about not wanting to leave – comparisons are made between the towns of England and those of Germany…civilization is older in England.
The main character is terrified at times – perhaps to the end – by what the future would bring, if she would return home with ‘nothing or being nothing’, the threat of failure being excruciatingly present for the girl that is not familiar with the concept that we might learn from experiencing adversity – in the lectures of the aforementioned marvelous Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, the example of a man who has had successes throughout all his life, reaching a high office at the White Office is given – no, this is not the Orange Idiot now haunting that place – and then committing suicide when the first crisis in his life finds him totally unprepared, for it had all been smooth sailing and he collapsed when tested…
Evaluating the English teenager, Fraulein is very rough, though maybe somewhat accurate, in saying that Henderson is too stiff and her good English influence had not quite managed to prevent her from being too serious – during the incident with the soup, the Fraulein noticed that Miriam is not ‘too domesticated and had been raised as countesses with her sisters – adding that the ‘teacher is sunshine, human sunshine’ which is such a beautiful thing to say, ‘motivational’ as we would probably say today, making the head of the finishing school quite a complex character, in that her grave, severe, almost cruel side has some other surfaces that make her empathize with Henderson and say that ‘they have so much in common’
Now that the terrible Corona virus is keeping so many hundreds of millions of people in homes, trying to avoid that ghastly possible contamination, this might be the perfect read, with its invitation to travel to another age and get acquitted with this vulnerable teenager, who has to confront her own anxieties, the malign approach of others, the downfall of her father and finds the grit, courage, strength, hope, purpose to fight on…
In balance, this pandemonium looks so weak, considering the advantages we have in this époque, when we are so much better prepared – even when led by calamities like Trump – to face the future than Miriam Henderson and by implication Dorothy Richardson ever were…
10 out of 10
This splendid magnum opus has been included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - in the Family and Friends Section, considered ‘the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English, and it is based on the brilliant author’s own experience, as she has left her home in 1891, at seventeen and because of her father’s financial problems, just like the main character in the book that you can find at https://librivox.org/, where this and multiple other masterpieces are available for free, once they have passed the seventy years copyright limit and they are not entangled in other limitations…Pointed Roofs was published in 1915…
Miriam Henderson is the enchanting main character, an alter ego of the fabulous Dorothy Richardson, the teenager that we meet in the first few pages, as she is contemplating her imminent departure from her home, though she is only seventeen, she would travel to Hanover in Germany, where she would be teaching in a finishing school – learn at the same time, though we might think of one of the frequently used expressions of Harvard Professor Tal Ben- Shahar, who says in his lectures, available online, ‘Learn to Fail, or Fail to learn, which is precisely what the heroine might have to go through, seeing that there are challenges, adversities and even traumas ahead and almost immediately after we see that she is preparing for a transformative, long journey, we are also aware of her fears and the anxiety that is overwhelming her…
She thinks about the future, terrified that she may have to face girls that would be hostile, she may prove inadequate – how do they teach English – she thinks of grammar lessons and then contemplates the alternative of working in a shop – but given her ignorance of the language, how would she be able to communicate, to give change – then there is the idea of being a servant – though the family had been, before the more recent serious financial troubles, if not well off, at least better than average, with elevated preoccupation, a knowledge of music, artistic inclinations and belonging to a ‘better, higher class’…indeed, this aspect would appear throughout, at one point there is the question of sharing a room with a ‘servant’ and that looks like a terrible insult and a humiliation…
When she helps with the soup at one meal, Miriam is embarrassed because she is obviously awkward and unable to maneuver and has to confess that she had never been allowed in the kitchen – expect when they were making the jam – and it is clear for the others and this evidence is expressed that she had lived a rather privileged life…the Fraulein who controls the Hanover finishing school with authority and severity might come to envy her, at least in some stages and this is one the other hand quite a traumatic experience for the progress, accession to higher levels of society comes easy, the descent from a better position to one of approximate poverty is quite painful and the girl preparing to travel to Germany and while there has many moments of gloomy exhortation, declaring herself ‘governessy’ and destined for a hard life…
A dramatic aspect for the main character is her dislike- actually loathing is the word - of women and men – though we could range this in the category of exaggerations and it is surely filtered by a ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, as in the Ingmar Bergman chef d’oeuvre, and once the girl will have passed through this period of adversity, she will have become a strong woman…’what does not kill one, makes her stronger’ to paraphrase – and especially German men might be contemptible, or at the very least undesirable for the protagonist who would be told by one of the girls that ‘she would marry her brother, who is wealthy’
When Miriam Henderson looks at the photos of those relatives, she is almost aghast and this is what happens with those she has seen on the street, in the shops, came in contact with, most seem to have a very different attitude from the English, and when it comes to the teachers, the ones she had had in Britain had been much more accommodating, polite, respectful than the Teutons that appear to despise, disconsider women with a macho, sexist, misogynist attitude towards what they see as their inferiors…
One of the characters that the heroine would meet in Hanover is ‘Mademoiselle, who is seventeen, rather uneducated for the standards of Miriam and Protestant – religion would be an issue and there is a moment when Miriam enters a Catholic Church for the first time and the impact is considerable, she says something about not wanting to leave – comparisons are made between the towns of England and those of Germany…civilization is older in England.
The main character is terrified at times – perhaps to the end – by what the future would bring, if she would return home with ‘nothing or being nothing’, the threat of failure being excruciatingly present for the girl that is not familiar with the concept that we might learn from experiencing adversity – in the lectures of the aforementioned marvelous Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, the example of a man who has had successes throughout all his life, reaching a high office at the White Office is given – no, this is not the Orange Idiot now haunting that place – and then committing suicide when the first crisis in his life finds him totally unprepared, for it had all been smooth sailing and he collapsed when tested…
Evaluating the English teenager, Fraulein is very rough, though maybe somewhat accurate, in saying that Henderson is too stiff and her good English influence had not quite managed to prevent her from being too serious – during the incident with the soup, the Fraulein noticed that Miriam is not ‘too domesticated and had been raised as countesses with her sisters – adding that the ‘teacher is sunshine, human sunshine’ which is such a beautiful thing to say, ‘motivational’ as we would probably say today, making the head of the finishing school quite a complex character, in that her grave, severe, almost cruel side has some other surfaces that make her empathize with Henderson and say that ‘they have so much in common’
Now that the terrible Corona virus is keeping so many hundreds of millions of people in homes, trying to avoid that ghastly possible contamination, this might be the perfect read, with its invitation to travel to another age and get acquitted with this vulnerable teenager, who has to confront her own anxieties, the malign approach of others, the downfall of her father and finds the grit, courage, strength, hope, purpose to fight on…
In balance, this pandemonium looks so weak, considering the advantages we have in this époque, when we are so much better prepared – even when led by calamities like Trump – to face the future than Miriam Henderson and by implication Dorothy Richardson ever were…
December 30, 2024
It is necessary for Miriam to get a job!
This is a big issue because Miriam is 17 years old, her family cannot afford to support her at home, yet she is not prepared for the working world. What jobs are even available to genteel young ladies in England and Europe? By the way this book was published prior to 1915.
As I read, am I to assume we’re pretending the Great War isn’t happening? Maybe the novel actions are taking place during 1900-1910?
The boarding school is in Hanover, Germany. Miriam is hired to be an English teacher, even though she is the same age as her students. (Like 5 or 10 students. All girls. And they are not all German. Some are English. One might be French. One is Australian).
Much applause going out, from me, to the late author. She wrote a stream-of-consciousness style about a girls’ boarding school! While there is (but we’re ignoring it) a war going on.
This is a big issue because Miriam is 17 years old, her family cannot afford to support her at home, yet she is not prepared for the working world. What jobs are even available to genteel young ladies in England and Europe? By the way this book was published prior to 1915.
As I read, am I to assume we’re pretending the Great War isn’t happening? Maybe the novel actions are taking place during 1900-1910?
The boarding school is in Hanover, Germany. Miriam is hired to be an English teacher, even though she is the same age as her students. (Like 5 or 10 students. All girls. And they are not all German. Some are English. One might be French. One is Australian).
Much applause going out, from me, to the late author. She wrote a stream-of-consciousness style about a girls’ boarding school! While there is (but we’re ignoring it) a war going on.
May 21, 2023
4.5 stars. Virginia Woolf gets all the press, but lemme tell ya, Dorothy Richardson is stellar. I just burned through Pointed Roofs in two days (would have been one if not for my damned work) and am moving forward to her next two novels, which she calls “chapters,” in her 13-novel Pilgrimage cycle. This is known as the first English novel written in stream-of-consciousness style, and it doesn’t disappoint. I am reminded why I always return to the modernists. They transformed prose in ways that even the most experimental novelists didn’t do in previous eras. It blows my mind to think Richardson was a contemporary of H.G. Wells. I love the guy, but he’s not even in the same league. It’s like comparing a Cessna to an Atlas rocket.
In this case, we get inside the mind of protagonist Miriam Henderson (a lightly fictionalized Richardson) as she is sent to be an English instructor at a finishing school due to her family’s financial problems, as was the case with Richardson herself. The family tells others that she is actually going to the finishing school as a student, so as not to reveal the embarrassment of their poor income. While there, Miriam struggles with her future – does she want to stay in Germany or return to England? become a teacher or a writer? is her agnosticism truly atheism? – while dealing with her gossipy fellow instructors and students, as well as the prudish, religious matron.
There are moments of quiet, intense beauty, including descriptions of listening to/playing music that are some of the most visceral and fluid I can remember reading – a kind of ekphrastic interpretation of sound into language, but also thought itself, as we encounter the aural through Miriam's perceptions as they relate to her memories and subconscious longings.
Although the middle section did slow down slightly, I wasn’t able to put this book down over the weekend. Looking forward to diving into the second novel soon.
In this case, we get inside the mind of protagonist Miriam Henderson (a lightly fictionalized Richardson) as she is sent to be an English instructor at a finishing school due to her family’s financial problems, as was the case with Richardson herself. The family tells others that she is actually going to the finishing school as a student, so as not to reveal the embarrassment of their poor income. While there, Miriam struggles with her future – does she want to stay in Germany or return to England? become a teacher or a writer? is her agnosticism truly atheism? – while dealing with her gossipy fellow instructors and students, as well as the prudish, religious matron.
There are moments of quiet, intense beauty, including descriptions of listening to/playing music that are some of the most visceral and fluid I can remember reading – a kind of ekphrastic interpretation of sound into language, but also thought itself, as we encounter the aural through Miriam's perceptions as they relate to her memories and subconscious longings.
Although the middle section did slow down slightly, I wasn’t able to put this book down over the weekend. Looking forward to diving into the second novel soon.
September 24, 2016
This isn't the kind of novel I would have picked up if I hadn't of had to read it for uni. I really don't like modernist novels that use stream of consciousness, so if that isn't your thing either, then I wouldn't recommend it. Even besides those stylistic choices, I didn't think there was anything of any substance to this novel. I enjoyed some of it, purely because I thought the descriptions were good in some parts and I could sympathise somewhat with the main character Miriam. But most of the time I was bored, confused, and desperate for it to end.
April 13, 2016
So I had to study this book for my Modernist Women Writers class and I understand the merit of the writing and how you can dig deep into it and try to get some meaning. The issue was the depth you had to dig and the amount of weird stuff you had to get through. In our class we worked from the Sinclair idea that Richardson is doing this thing, and she doesn't care if you like it or not. Another question, is it really literature? Is it just continuous writing? This is the first in thirteen books, that I hear, nothing really happens in. Richardson and I just weren't meant to be. We're splitting amicably and I don't even have anything else to say about the book. Stream of consciousness, modernism, and I might give it another chance though (just with a different book and a different author).
September 13, 2016
I'm not a big fan of stream-of-consciousness and for that reason, I really struggled with this book which is told in that form. I found the lack of plot rather dull and found it hard to remain engaged and even now struggle to remember what happened.
I just read a plot summary of this book and realised I had completely missed something really important I honestly am not the kind of person that should be reading these books. THEY DO NOT WORK WITH ME
I just read a plot summary of this book and realised I had completely missed something really important I honestly am not the kind of person that should be reading these books. THEY DO NOT WORK WITH ME
July 28, 2025
Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage is one of those works I've always known I ought to read but never have. I finally plunged into Pointed Roofs, the first novel of the 13-'chapter' series, with much anticipation and curiosity. Initially, the writing style engaged but later, the contents began to drag. That's until close to the end when my attention was well and truly piqued.
17-year-old Miriam Henderson is the well-brought-up daughter of the gentleman son of shopkeepers, fallen on hard times. She is forced to find work as a pupil-teacher at a girls' boarding school in Hanover, Germany, and the initial chapters show her leaving home, travelling across Europe with her father, and settling into her new role. The middle chapters took a while to get though as Richardson's experimental decision to eschew conventional plot --and to introduce a myriad German and English schoolgirl characters -- required some concentration on my part. Then on the final pages, two passages made me very glad I had persisted to the end.
The first of these was the section in Chapter X when Miriam goes into an internalized riff on why she feels she is constantly pretending and why she may not be able to stay in Germany, aside from the financial constraints with which she is again beset (she can't afford to stay on for the summer without being paid). Part of this is having to pretend she is religious when she really is not.
"Darwin had come since then. there were people -- distinguished minds -- who thought Darwin was true.
No God..No Creation..The struggle for Existence... Everybody groping and fighting
...Fraulein...Some said it was true...some not (...) It was true..Just monkeys fighting..but who began it? Who made Fraulein?
(...)
Then nothing matters. Just one little short life ...".
Here, Miriam's existential beliefs become personally relevant, as she relates them to real life. She's talking about survival of the fittest here and relating it to the internal tussles and squabbles and small petty hatreds that she sees everyday at her German school.
The book is set in 1891, about 32 years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species -- but it's hard not to think that its publication date -- in 1915, during the First World War -- is in the author's mind, somewhere, too.
The second startling section is on the penultimate page when a subtle remark -- worthy of E.M. Forster -- makes Miriam, and the reader -- perform a mental 360° spin.
Up to now, Miriam has felt Fraulein, the school's headmistress, dislikes her, especially after she told her she would have to change her manner in order to succeed. Miriam felt she might have been wrong when Fraulein moved her to a superior bedroom, setting off a wave of vicious jealousy from her former roommate, Mademoiselle. Yet Miriam also describes Fraulein as engaging in 'despotic nonsense', and depicts her as cold and controlling throughout
But then, as Miriam is leaving forever, THIS happens, as they are travelling to the station together in a carriage:
"Presently, Fraulein laid her gloved hand on Miriam's gloved one. 'You and I have, I think, much in common.'
Miriam froze."
Is Fraulein being manipulative again? Or is Miriam, too, destined to become 'an old teacher and cancer coming'? Is Fraulein Miriam's doppelganger -- herself as she will be in later life, if she doesn't watch out?
I felt devastated for Miriam. But now I want to read on... How WILL Miriam turn out in later life?
***
So that's the subject matter dealt with but Richardson is really famous for her style rather than the contents of her books. Publishing in 1915, she was one of the first, along with Proust and James to develop Stream of Consciouness techniques, several years before they were were adopted by Virginia Woolf. (Woolf probably did a better job of maintaining reader interest whilst pushing out the boat on style -- but that's by-the-by).
Famously, Richardson herself didn't really like the term 'stream of consciousness' -- and she was right. 'Stream' implies a continuous flow -- while Miriam's thoughts and experiences are divided into separate units of time with gaps in between. It also implies an unconscious gushing and there is more artistry here than that. Richardson preferred the term 'interior monologue' but that's not quite right either. Again, because interrupted, the monologues are multiple -- so, 'Interior Monologues', perhaps.
Richardson was the first female author to eliminate the authorial voice, to get rid of narratorial presence and commentary. She was also the first, perhaps, to tell a story entirely through the mind of a single female character without any other presence to filter or interpret her thoughts. There is a close identification between author and character -- although the author IS there as a separate presence for instance in the decision to use third rather than first person (indicating obliquely that this is fiction not autobiography). She is also there in deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, where there will be gaps in the narrative, and despite eschewing plot, choosing how to arrange material -- for example the placement of Fraulein's shock announcement of her similarity to Miriam on practically the final page.
17-year-old Miriam Henderson is the well-brought-up daughter of the gentleman son of shopkeepers, fallen on hard times. She is forced to find work as a pupil-teacher at a girls' boarding school in Hanover, Germany, and the initial chapters show her leaving home, travelling across Europe with her father, and settling into her new role. The middle chapters took a while to get though as Richardson's experimental decision to eschew conventional plot --and to introduce a myriad German and English schoolgirl characters -- required some concentration on my part. Then on the final pages, two passages made me very glad I had persisted to the end.
The first of these was the section in Chapter X when Miriam goes into an internalized riff on why she feels she is constantly pretending and why she may not be able to stay in Germany, aside from the financial constraints with which she is again beset (she can't afford to stay on for the summer without being paid). Part of this is having to pretend she is religious when she really is not.
"Darwin had come since then. there were people -- distinguished minds -- who thought Darwin was true.
No God..No Creation..The struggle for Existence... Everybody groping and fighting
...Fraulein...Some said it was true...some not (...) It was true..Just monkeys fighting..but who began it? Who made Fraulein?
(...)
Then nothing matters. Just one little short life ...".
Here, Miriam's existential beliefs become personally relevant, as she relates them to real life. She's talking about survival of the fittest here and relating it to the internal tussles and squabbles and small petty hatreds that she sees everyday at her German school.
The book is set in 1891, about 32 years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species -- but it's hard not to think that its publication date -- in 1915, during the First World War -- is in the author's mind, somewhere, too.
The second startling section is on the penultimate page when a subtle remark -- worthy of E.M. Forster -- makes Miriam, and the reader -- perform a mental 360° spin.
Up to now, Miriam has felt Fraulein, the school's headmistress, dislikes her, especially after she told her she would have to change her manner in order to succeed. Miriam felt she might have been wrong when Fraulein moved her to a superior bedroom, setting off a wave of vicious jealousy from her former roommate, Mademoiselle. Yet Miriam also describes Fraulein as engaging in 'despotic nonsense', and depicts her as cold and controlling throughout
But then, as Miriam is leaving forever, THIS happens, as they are travelling to the station together in a carriage:
"Presently, Fraulein laid her gloved hand on Miriam's gloved one. 'You and I have, I think, much in common.'
Miriam froze."
Is Fraulein being manipulative again? Or is Miriam, too, destined to become 'an old teacher and cancer coming'? Is Fraulein Miriam's doppelganger -- herself as she will be in later life, if she doesn't watch out?
I felt devastated for Miriam. But now I want to read on... How WILL Miriam turn out in later life?
***
So that's the subject matter dealt with but Richardson is really famous for her style rather than the contents of her books. Publishing in 1915, she was one of the first, along with Proust and James to develop Stream of Consciouness techniques, several years before they were were adopted by Virginia Woolf. (Woolf probably did a better job of maintaining reader interest whilst pushing out the boat on style -- but that's by-the-by).
Famously, Richardson herself didn't really like the term 'stream of consciousness' -- and she was right. 'Stream' implies a continuous flow -- while Miriam's thoughts and experiences are divided into separate units of time with gaps in between. It also implies an unconscious gushing and there is more artistry here than that. Richardson preferred the term 'interior monologue' but that's not quite right either. Again, because interrupted, the monologues are multiple -- so, 'Interior Monologues', perhaps.
Richardson was the first female author to eliminate the authorial voice, to get rid of narratorial presence and commentary. She was also the first, perhaps, to tell a story entirely through the mind of a single female character without any other presence to filter or interpret her thoughts. There is a close identification between author and character -- although the author IS there as a separate presence for instance in the decision to use third rather than first person (indicating obliquely that this is fiction not autobiography). She is also there in deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, where there will be gaps in the narrative, and despite eschewing plot, choosing how to arrange material -- for example the placement of Fraulein's shock announcement of her similarity to Miriam on practically the final page.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 30, 2018
An interesting entry into streams of consciousness literature, though I find that there were too many characters to keep track of.
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