Pilgrimage, Volume 1: Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb

by Dorothy M. Richardson

490 pages, Library Binding

Published January 1, 1967

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.

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Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

That was feminine worldliness, pretending to be interested so that pleasant things might go on. Masculine worldliness was refusing to be interested so that it might go on doing things. Feminine worldliness then meant perpetual hard work and cheating and pretence at the door of a hidden garden, a lovely hidden garden. Masculine worldliness meant never really being there; always talking about things that had happened or making plans for things that might happen. There was nothing that could happen that was not in some way the same as anything else. Nobody was ever quite there, realizing.

This work is the first of four to thirteen volumes, depending on your edition, encompassing a total of more than 2000 pages detailing a bookish, largely reserved English white girl/woman doing bookish, largely reserved English white girl/woman things in a manner of writing that, a century later, doesn't seem all that impressive to folks who complacently take their literature history as dictated by the Powers That Be for granted. This means that, for all its purported difficulties and (rightful) place in (Anglo) writing history, a reader's appreciation of it boils down as much to their personal engagement with the story as it does to their appreciation of the more dry cut mores of of prose, characterization, vernacular, narrative structure, yadda, yadda, yadda. It's true that, if Austen came out with free indirect discourse, Richardson came out with stream of consciousness around a century later, but that latter writer lacks the sacrosanct buffer composed of both actual readers and those who are satisfied that they have the one (1) woman writer they can include and thus escape that niggling feeling of personal shame for the most part. As a result, in this corner of the reading landscape, we get certain kinds of folks: believers that Dickens and Shakespeare is all one needs of the world, drawn by the promise of 1001 BBYD and other hoity toity lists of esteemed clout, and ultimately disappointed when it's not war, or politics, or difficult reading for difficult readings sake. Now, I personally didn't truly start getting into this until the first section/chapter/something was there and gone with its German (a rare occasion when my learned language of choice was the one going untranslated), and there are a portion of pages where the n-word is dropped in some of the most jarring ways imaginable that you understand why there were 'dear looking grannies' among the rioters at the US White House a few weeks back. Still, there is something there that is continually building upon itself in riotously glorious ways at times, and I can't remember the last book where I was able to sit back and just enjoy the borderline hedonism of a spring-field day, a lovely turn of dress, an interior decoration or a spot of human connection with another human soul. I may have started this work as much for reading cred, but now I'm hellbent on finishing it for the sake of seeing its potentials fulfilled.

Perhaps that self, leaving others to do the practical things, erecting a little wall of unapproachability between herself and her family that she might be free to dream alone in corners, had always been wrong. But it was herself, the nearest most intimate self she had known. And the discovery that it was not dead [...] brought her warm moments of reassurance. It was not perhaps a 'good' self, but it was herself, her own familiar secretly happy and rejoicing self—not dead.

The complete set of 'Pilgrimage' in my possession is most likely the cheapest and ill put together edition on the market. Supplemental material is limited to less than twenty pages of introduction + foreword at the beginning, there's nary a footnote or endnote in sight, and the very last page contains an advertisement for a collection of self-help books on such vaunted topics as better vocabulary, better writing, and speed reading. If it were in translation, I would probably never bother with it, as my penchant for not worrying about fluency and original language and all that (if you have a problem with that, come talk to me once you've achieved mastery over the 120+ languages logged thus far in my library) doesn't mean I disregard adequate preparation. As it stands, I more than likely still missed bevies upon bevies of references suited to late 19th chunks of England and to a lesser extent Germany as viewed through the eyes of seventeen going on twenty(? time is a mystery in this work) Anglo white woman taking on the role of teacher/governess with no romanticism plot waiting in the wings to sweep her away. So, what do you get instead? Mediations on music and religion, increasingly burgeoning awareness of gender roles and the associated patriarchy, delights in the everyday when the light is clear and the colors shine through, moroseness when one is no more than a cog in the machine that is the lot of those whose assured place in high society has been irretrievably lost, bookishness, flirtations, pedagogy, deep seated anxiety, siblings, mother, father, and an insight into the singular facades that people present to each other to gain marriage, to gain power, to gain money, fame, and the kind of independence that Miriam, the main character, still cannot imagine outside of the constraints of being tied to some uninterested, unfeeling, unmitigated force of casual cruelty that will be totally responsible for one's finances and, thus, has a high chance of being totally responsible for one's doom. A certain joy in certain kind of aesthetics that is still classed as 'feminine' that certain folks see a single word of and throw up their hands in 'boredom.' Nothing new in this section of the world in the long run, then, especially if one's read anything of the Brontës and co. of 'Silly novels by Lady Novelists' of a particularly English repute, and yet...there's a great deal to relate to that is written in a prose that flows soft or hard when it needs to, as well as a certain hard won joy that strikes the narrative every so often, as well as certain conclusions drawn in a manner that one recognizes from having done the same in the process of building up the bedrock of their raison d'être. It won't be that way for all, and since this is no white boy work that inspires self-incrimination Catholic doublethink guilt in many a soul who tells itself it likes something because it's 'universal', readers of it will be more honest about such. Whether they're equally honest about everything else they take upon themselves cause whatever peer reading group does the same is the question.

Their husbands grew to hate them because they had no thoughts. But if a woman had thoughts a man would not be 'silly' about her for five years.

There was some awful meaning in the way English people missed the right sound; all the names in India, all the Eastern words. How could an English traveller hear hahreem, and speak it hairum, Aswan and say Ass-ou-ann? It made them miss other things and think wrongly about them.

All in all, while this isn't an absolute favorite of mine, the writing melds so well with my brain in terms of prose, themes, and overall holisms that I'm more than willing to stick with it till the very end. It's not a work that I would recommend to anyone who hasn't already previously cut their teeth on reads running into the thousands of pages, or anyone who isn't likely to find themselves committing to a read such as Beauvoir's four volume autobiography, each tome of substantial weight in terms of both physical heft and ideological content. What certain folks who are likely to find themselves in this area of literature forget is that reading is a practice in and of itself, so to take something on that is past the 2000+ page mark and then blame it for its long term goals is petty at best and dishonest otherwise. Yeah, this work isn't concerned with a lot of the exciting stuff that readers are trained to appreciate one way or another, and if you're looking for a self-adulating treasure hunt that many a white boy of mo/pomo and co. have hurled across the pages (with various degrees of actual writing skill and serious literary intent), the most interesting thing to you will be the namedrop of 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'. However, if you're five to ten novels into the bibliography of Woolf and are wondering why the most popular quote on this site from this supposed 'novel of the female revolution' concerns a namedrop of some particular longwinded work by some long dead white dude, you're probably in the right place. It's not perfect, even in the politically correct sense of the word, but the burgeoning critical awareness that is as fully capable of being appreciative as it is deriding is a breath of fresh air for one such as me, and the fact that its 'stream of consciousness' (Richardson thought that term highly inadequate) really hits its stride at times makes me eager to discover how much more fully it develops when the author brings the main character to fuller fruition in terms of her grasp on both life and her self. Two millennia and counting worth of pages may seem a bit much to get just that, but I'll take that over the tens, even hundreds, of thousands of pages comprising the same old adulated 'classics' that many a critic uncritically swallows down and thinks themselves superhuman for it any day.

What's the use of feeling like that if it doesn't stay? It doesn't change anything. Next time I'll make it stay. It might whisk me right away. There's something in me that can't be touched or altered. Me. If it comes again. If it's stronger every time...Perhaps it goes on getting stronger till you die.

P.S. This edition has a few blurbs written in the front that are so off the mark that I doubt they went more than ten or twenty pages in at any given section. Guess that's what happens when marketers are looking for love and war while Richardson just wants to figure out how to fulfillingly live with herself to the full extent of her capabilities. In any case, I'll be returning to this in the form of the second volume at the beginning of the next month: one must take their time with works such as these if one expects to get anything out of it.

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume contains the first 3 novels of Richardson's Pilgrimage series of 13. This series is considered the first of stream-of consciousness novels, but it is nothing like Virginia Woolf. It is much more readable. It is also semi-autobiographical, which explains how well Richardson can describe the inner thoughts, feelings, and worries of Miriam.

Pointed Roofs: 4 stars. Miriam, about age 17, learns of her father's financial difficulties and decides to help. She takes a job as a governess in Germany. Much of the novel consists of her internal thoughts and doubts, and happiness when she is happy. She is somewhat homesick and constantly questions her German and French skills. She really just wants to play piano. Richardson does a very good job of showing the anxiety and doubts of a young woman raised upper middle class but now working.

Backwater: 3 stars. Miriam has left Germany and is now at a semi-boarding school in north London. She is much less happy here, though just as in doubt of her abilities. She finds, upon leaving, that her students love her. She really misses the school in Germany. Meanwhile, two of her sisters are engaged and the whole dating scene (such as it is among the upper middle class) stresses her out. She desperately wants to be married herself, but is also terrified of being married. She is about age 18-19, being there for 15-18 months.

Honeycomb: 3 stars. Miriam has left the north London school and has found a position as governess to 2 children in an upper class household. One of her future brothers-in-law has helped her find this place. She loves the house, but goes back and forth over how much she likes the family and their friends. She realizes she is more a glorified babysitter than a teacher, as children of this class don't really need to know anything, or so she thinks. Meanwhile her sisters are getting married, she has some prospects but again, is also terrified of them. She is a bit of a rebel, and has begun smoking and visits one of her prospects at his bachelor apartment. Her mother is also sick, and the book ends with her caring for her mother at the seaside.