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Pilgrimage #2
Backwater
Dorothy Miller Richardson (1873-1957) was the first writer to publish an English-language novel using what was to become known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her thirteen novel sequence "Pilgrimage" is one of the great 20th century works of modernist and feminist literature in English.
255 pages, ebook
First published August 21, 1916
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60 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy M. Richardson
71 books64 followersDorothy Miller Richardson
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.
Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. From 1917 until 1939 the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London, and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.
Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. From 1917 until 1939 the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London, and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 9, 2015
4.5 stars
Book two of Dorothy Richardson’s epic thirteen volume Pilgrimage. In this novel Miriam is back in London teaching at a small school for girls run by the Misses Perne. It is important to remember that Miriam is still in her teenage years at this point; she is not a qualified teacher.
Miriam’s life is still very much a typical life that a young middle class Victorian woman would have experienced. She goes to parties and dances, spends some time at the seaside, goes boating and even has a toboggan ride. She mixes with eligible young men. Miriam finds a cure for her isolation in the reading of sensational novels, which she hides and reads in secret. One of these is Ouida, a rather unconventional English Victorian novelist (Maria Louise Rame). There are accounts of Ouida when she lived at the Langham Hotel in the 1860s of her writing in bed by candlelight, curtains drawn and with lots of purple flowers. She held soirees whose members included Wilde, Swinburne, Browning, Collins and Millais. She wrote over 40 novels and Miriam discovers her and the descriptions of her initial purchases done rather guiltily are amusing.
What makes the novel interesting is the filtering through Miriam. She can be irritating (what teenager isn’t) and at times there are assumptions relating to race and class which do not sit easily; but on the whole she is engaging and her questioning of conventions is always interesting. There are some interesting reflections on Englishness and sentimentality and as usual Miriam questions religion. It has been noted that the Pilgrimage novels are an account of the slow move from the Victorian era to the modern age and Richardson seems to have a good grasp of character development which makes the progression interesting.
An interesting aside I found is an article called The Urban Observer by Deborah Longworth (you’ll find it in the Camden Town Group section on the Tate website) which examines the tradition of London observers, especially through the medium of the artist-flanuer. She pays particular attention to female observers with an interesting section on Richardson’s Pilgrimage; one of the sections she focuses on is the omnibus ride in this novel where Miriam reflects on the monotony of the London landscape. There is an extensive quote;
“They lumbered at last round a corner and out into a wide thoroughfare, drawing up outside a newly-built public-house. Above it rose row upon row of upper windows sunk in masses of ornamental terra-cotta-coloured plaster. Branch roads, laid with tram-lines led off in every direction. Miriam’s eyes followed a dull blue tram with a grubby white-painted seatless roof jingling busily off up a roadway where short trees stood all the way along in the small dim gardens of little grey houses ... The little shock sent her mind feeling out along the road they had just left. She considered its unbroken length, its shops, its treelessness. The wide thoroughfare, up which they now began to rumble, repeated it on a larger scale. The pavements were wide causeways reached from the roadway by stone steps, three deep. The people passing along them were unlike any she knew. There were no ladies, no gentleman, no girls or young men such as she knew. They were all alike. They were ... She could find no word for the strange impression they made. It coloured the whole of the district through which they had come”
The horror of the suburbs is eventually replaced by London proper (for Miriam) Regent Street and Piccadilly.
It’s a fascinating picture of a particular time and place.
Book two of Dorothy Richardson’s epic thirteen volume Pilgrimage. In this novel Miriam is back in London teaching at a small school for girls run by the Misses Perne. It is important to remember that Miriam is still in her teenage years at this point; she is not a qualified teacher.
Miriam’s life is still very much a typical life that a young middle class Victorian woman would have experienced. She goes to parties and dances, spends some time at the seaside, goes boating and even has a toboggan ride. She mixes with eligible young men. Miriam finds a cure for her isolation in the reading of sensational novels, which she hides and reads in secret. One of these is Ouida, a rather unconventional English Victorian novelist (Maria Louise Rame). There are accounts of Ouida when she lived at the Langham Hotel in the 1860s of her writing in bed by candlelight, curtains drawn and with lots of purple flowers. She held soirees whose members included Wilde, Swinburne, Browning, Collins and Millais. She wrote over 40 novels and Miriam discovers her and the descriptions of her initial purchases done rather guiltily are amusing.
What makes the novel interesting is the filtering through Miriam. She can be irritating (what teenager isn’t) and at times there are assumptions relating to race and class which do not sit easily; but on the whole she is engaging and her questioning of conventions is always interesting. There are some interesting reflections on Englishness and sentimentality and as usual Miriam questions religion. It has been noted that the Pilgrimage novels are an account of the slow move from the Victorian era to the modern age and Richardson seems to have a good grasp of character development which makes the progression interesting.
An interesting aside I found is an article called The Urban Observer by Deborah Longworth (you’ll find it in the Camden Town Group section on the Tate website) which examines the tradition of London observers, especially through the medium of the artist-flanuer. She pays particular attention to female observers with an interesting section on Richardson’s Pilgrimage; one of the sections she focuses on is the omnibus ride in this novel where Miriam reflects on the monotony of the London landscape. There is an extensive quote;
“They lumbered at last round a corner and out into a wide thoroughfare, drawing up outside a newly-built public-house. Above it rose row upon row of upper windows sunk in masses of ornamental terra-cotta-coloured plaster. Branch roads, laid with tram-lines led off in every direction. Miriam’s eyes followed a dull blue tram with a grubby white-painted seatless roof jingling busily off up a roadway where short trees stood all the way along in the small dim gardens of little grey houses ... The little shock sent her mind feeling out along the road they had just left. She considered its unbroken length, its shops, its treelessness. The wide thoroughfare, up which they now began to rumble, repeated it on a larger scale. The pavements were wide causeways reached from the roadway by stone steps, three deep. The people passing along them were unlike any she knew. There were no ladies, no gentleman, no girls or young men such as she knew. They were all alike. They were ... She could find no word for the strange impression they made. It coloured the whole of the district through which they had come”
The horror of the suburbs is eventually replaced by London proper (for Miriam) Regent Street and Piccadilly.
It’s a fascinating picture of a particular time and place.
February 9, 2016
This was my second step into the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, and the second of the thirteen volume series of novels that Dorothy Richardson titled ‘Pilgrimage’ after she found a new way of writing, a way of writing that simply captured that thoughts and perceptions of the woman whose life she portrayed.
The story opens a few months after Miriam returned from Germany to her home in London. Her happiness to be back there is tangible, but she must come to terms with the knowledge that the home and family that she knew is changing. One sister has left home to become a governess, another is newly engaged, and only the youngest of the four of them is still a child at home.
Miriam knows that she must find a new position. She didn’t want to go but she knew that she must.
She is employed at a small school for girls run by the Misses Perne. They are delighted to have her, she is more than capable of doing what is asked of her, but she isn’t happy. Her second teaching position has her feeling that is unsuited to the role and the environment. She couldn’t cope with the restrictions and confines, or with the expectation that she would promote a faith the she could not accept for herself.
But she doesn’t know what else she might want to be.
That was understandable. She lived in Victorian England, in the age of the ‘new woman’; her only training came in the schools were she taught; and that she needed to work at all was because her father’s business had failed; it wasn’t what she and her sisters had been raised to expect.
Miriam’s life at school in term time is set against her life at home in the holidays. That life is what most middle class young women would have experienced. She goes to parties and dances. She spends some time at the seaside. She crosses paths with eligible young men.
She doesn’t find that entirely easy either. Because Miriam has yet to learn self-awareness. She often fails to appreciate how her words and her actions will be interpreted by others, and she missed cues and social signals. Her intentions were good, but she could appear to be gauche and thoughtless.
Miriam had a coping strategy: she had a secret passion for sensational novels. She devoured books by Charlotte Yonge, Rhoda Broughton and, most of all, Ouida.
That was a link with Miriam that I hadn’t expected to find! But I had expected to find Dorothy Richardson difficult and, two books in, I am not finding her difficult at all.
I do have to say though that she rewards slow, careful and thoughtful reading.
Miriam had led a very sheltered life, but she was slowly learning how to deal with the world. She was aware though that she was out of step with her contemporaries; she had ideals, she had ambitions, but she had no idea yet where she wanted to go or what she wanted to do.
I know a little more that she does, because I know that this is an autobiographical work, and because I know a little of how Dorothy Richardson’s story plays out. I’m eager to move forward through the other volumes of Pilgrimage, but I know that I have to move slowly and appreciate each stage of Miriam’s life.
The writing is much to good to resist. There was no narrator, but Miriam’s inner world, her thoughts and her perceptions were captured so perfectly and purely that I felt that I completely understood how it felt to be her.
It’s such clever writing, it’s clear that Dorothy Richardson was far ahead of her peers, and I am so sorry that she was somehow over-shadowed when others caught up with her.
One consequence of the was she wrote was that picture of the world around Miriam was sometimes less that clear. Because I was with her in the present but I hadn’t been with her for all of her past, and because I could only learn things as she did. It is so tempting to look up the facts of Dorothy Richardson’s life, to order one of the biographies that I know my library has tucked away, but I am going to resist, because I know sharing in Miriam’s world will be much more rewarding without the weight of knowledge.
I have noticed that she has formed no close relationships with people outside her family circle; I hope it won’t be too long before she does, for her own sake and because I think that when she does her story will be enriched.
This book – like the first – ends with Miriam deciding that she must make a change.
And that leaves me eager to move on to the next volume of her story, and then the next ….
The story opens a few months after Miriam returned from Germany to her home in London. Her happiness to be back there is tangible, but she must come to terms with the knowledge that the home and family that she knew is changing. One sister has left home to become a governess, another is newly engaged, and only the youngest of the four of them is still a child at home.
Miriam knows that she must find a new position. She didn’t want to go but she knew that she must.
She is employed at a small school for girls run by the Misses Perne. They are delighted to have her, she is more than capable of doing what is asked of her, but she isn’t happy. Her second teaching position has her feeling that is unsuited to the role and the environment. She couldn’t cope with the restrictions and confines, or with the expectation that she would promote a faith the she could not accept for herself.
But she doesn’t know what else she might want to be.
That was understandable. She lived in Victorian England, in the age of the ‘new woman’; her only training came in the schools were she taught; and that she needed to work at all was because her father’s business had failed; it wasn’t what she and her sisters had been raised to expect.
Miriam’s life at school in term time is set against her life at home in the holidays. That life is what most middle class young women would have experienced. She goes to parties and dances. She spends some time at the seaside. She crosses paths with eligible young men.
She doesn’t find that entirely easy either. Because Miriam has yet to learn self-awareness. She often fails to appreciate how her words and her actions will be interpreted by others, and she missed cues and social signals. Her intentions were good, but she could appear to be gauche and thoughtless.
Miriam had a coping strategy: she had a secret passion for sensational novels. She devoured books by Charlotte Yonge, Rhoda Broughton and, most of all, Ouida.
That was a link with Miriam that I hadn’t expected to find! But I had expected to find Dorothy Richardson difficult and, two books in, I am not finding her difficult at all.
I do have to say though that she rewards slow, careful and thoughtful reading.
Miriam had led a very sheltered life, but she was slowly learning how to deal with the world. She was aware though that she was out of step with her contemporaries; she had ideals, she had ambitions, but she had no idea yet where she wanted to go or what she wanted to do.
I know a little more that she does, because I know that this is an autobiographical work, and because I know a little of how Dorothy Richardson’s story plays out. I’m eager to move forward through the other volumes of Pilgrimage, but I know that I have to move slowly and appreciate each stage of Miriam’s life.
The writing is much to good to resist. There was no narrator, but Miriam’s inner world, her thoughts and her perceptions were captured so perfectly and purely that I felt that I completely understood how it felt to be her.
It’s such clever writing, it’s clear that Dorothy Richardson was far ahead of her peers, and I am so sorry that she was somehow over-shadowed when others caught up with her.
One consequence of the was she wrote was that picture of the world around Miriam was sometimes less that clear. Because I was with her in the present but I hadn’t been with her for all of her past, and because I could only learn things as she did. It is so tempting to look up the facts of Dorothy Richardson’s life, to order one of the biographies that I know my library has tucked away, but I am going to resist, because I know sharing in Miriam’s world will be much more rewarding without the weight of knowledge.
I have noticed that she has formed no close relationships with people outside her family circle; I hope it won’t be too long before she does, for her own sake and because I think that when she does her story will be enriched.
This book – like the first – ends with Miriam deciding that she must make a change.
And that leaves me eager to move on to the next volume of her story, and then the next ….
June 25, 2021
When they got themselves and Julia's luggage out of the cab and into the train for Banbury Park, she was still pondering uneasily over her own dislike of appearing as a successful teacher. That was what she had become. If she was really a teacher now, just that in life, it meant that she must decide at once whether she really meant to teach always.
It doesn't feel fair, does it? - being forced to make a decision that will determine your identity, particularly as a result of some other's impression of you. This is Miriam's struggle in Backwater. The title itself is revealing about her attitudes towards her surroundings, and foreshadows her decision not to remain.
I am the anti-Miriam, in action if not in spirit. I chose to teach. I stayed in the same town I grew up in. The same neighborhood. The same nowhere.
Stagnation, but also peace. Somewhere the current won't quite reach.
Forgive my self-indulgence.
Stream of keyboard strokes.
Yet again this classic trope where characters must choose between settling down and living comfortably, or striking out and living meaningfully. Cliches for a reason, etc. But I'd love a subtler analysis of the overlap.
. . . she taught a system of things she had been brought up in. But all the same, she rushed along sweeping the girls with her . . . and the girls believed her. If I taught her system I should have false lips and the girls would not believe me.
I often feel like I've been brainwashed. Certain feelings are common, sure, but to what extent is this some sick feedback loop? Cliches for a reason, fine. But when repeatedly reinforced and funneled directly into developing minds through all forms of at this point practically omnipotent media . . .
I often wish that other things had been romanticized. I might have been otherwise. Or at least I might feel more solid in my own choices. You look back and suddenly realize that you've been making them all along. Only occasionally you've noticed. But now you're here. What superhuman presence it would take to truly plan your life . . .
I don't yet know how Miriam's choice will shape her world. After all, this is only volume two of thirteen. But there was something painful about this part. Something that made me feel maybe I'd stayed in the backwater, and she'd be moving on without me.
It doesn't feel fair, does it? - being forced to make a decision that will determine your identity, particularly as a result of some other's impression of you. This is Miriam's struggle in Backwater. The title itself is revealing about her attitudes towards her surroundings, and foreshadows her decision not to remain.
I am the anti-Miriam, in action if not in spirit. I chose to teach. I stayed in the same town I grew up in. The same neighborhood. The same nowhere.
Stagnation, but also peace. Somewhere the current won't quite reach.
Forgive my self-indulgence.
Stream of keyboard strokes.
Yet again this classic trope where characters must choose between settling down and living comfortably, or striking out and living meaningfully. Cliches for a reason, etc. But I'd love a subtler analysis of the overlap.
. . . she taught a system of things she had been brought up in. But all the same, she rushed along sweeping the girls with her . . . and the girls believed her. If I taught her system I should have false lips and the girls would not believe me.
I often feel like I've been brainwashed. Certain feelings are common, sure, but to what extent is this some sick feedback loop? Cliches for a reason, fine. But when repeatedly reinforced and funneled directly into developing minds through all forms of at this point practically omnipotent media . . .
I often wish that other things had been romanticized. I might have been otherwise. Or at least I might feel more solid in my own choices. You look back and suddenly realize that you've been making them all along. Only occasionally you've noticed. But now you're here. What superhuman presence it would take to truly plan your life . . .
I don't yet know how Miriam's choice will shape her world. After all, this is only volume two of thirteen. But there was something painful about this part. Something that made me feel maybe I'd stayed in the backwater, and she'd be moving on without me.
April 14, 2022
An interesting character based, realist novel about young Miriam Henderson’s experience as a teacher in a North London school, set in the 1890s. The narrative is straightforward and from Miriam’s perspective and describes a distinctively female experience.
The author was the first to write in the ‘stream of consciousness’ style.
This book was first published in 1916 and is the second book in the ‘Pilgrimage’ series of thirteen novels. Miriam Henderson, the central character in the Pilgrimage novel sequence, is based on the author’s own life between 1891 and 1915.
The author was the first to write in the ‘stream of consciousness’ style.
This book was first published in 1916 and is the second book in the ‘Pilgrimage’ series of thirteen novels. Miriam Henderson, the central character in the Pilgrimage novel sequence, is based on the author’s own life between 1891 and 1915.
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April 6, 2020Miriam Henderson continues to ponder the world, her place in it, whether or not she really has a place in it, what human relationships mean (or don’t) and her general future, which, despite the frequency with which her various sisters get engaged and married, does not seem to include marriage for her.
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February 18, 2022Two down in the Pilgrimage series, eleven to go! Watch this space.
No reviews for now, but this volume contains a really breathtaking description of the protagonist's hands. It's that kind of series.
No reviews for now, but this volume contains a really breathtaking description of the protagonist's hands. It's that kind of series.
May 29, 2023
The second novel in Richardson’s Pilgrimage cycle finds Miriam back home and taking up her position as a teacher. Whereas the first novel seemed to take music as its leitmotif, this novel does so with the written word, as Miriam finds herself searching in books for some clue to life’s purpose. (One place she doesn't find it: in the endless banalities of Little Women: "Those American girls in Little Women and Good Wives made fun out of everything. But they never had to face real horrors and hide them from everybody; mewed up." A sentiment I share with Miriam/Richardson.)
Interestingly enough, she also meets a man who claims to be doing the same, but Miriam’s icy defenses keep him at a distance, even as she struggles to accept that they might have quite a bit in common. In Miriam’s world (and in Richardson’s life, one suspects), men are the purveyors of everything "loud," "noisy," and coarse. So she shuns them – even the ones she feels might provide her with a modicum of solace or security.
As with the first novel, this one ends with a departure, as Miriam leaves her teaching while Julia (perhaps a “double” who represents what Miriam could be if she were more open?) takes her place. Despite these being intensely personal novels of feminine identity formation, I find myself strongly relating to and identifying with Miriam: her struggle to understand the purpose in life; her desire to both connect with and keep at a distance the noisy world of suffering and banality; her inability to find solace in institutions (familial, religious, educational); and her perspective as a “disappointed idealist” who is an "outsider" perhaps in her own mind more so than in her outward interactions. Unlike the more male-centric "outsider" novels from the 19th and 20th centuries, from Atala to Steppenwolf, Richardson presents not a melodramatic woe-is-me lament, but rather a more intensely withdrawn portrait of "quiet desperation" yearning to find equilibrium.
I love this character, and I look forward to seeing where Richardson takes her.
Interestingly enough, she also meets a man who claims to be doing the same, but Miriam’s icy defenses keep him at a distance, even as she struggles to accept that they might have quite a bit in common. In Miriam’s world (and in Richardson’s life, one suspects), men are the purveyors of everything "loud," "noisy," and coarse. So she shuns them – even the ones she feels might provide her with a modicum of solace or security.
As with the first novel, this one ends with a departure, as Miriam leaves her teaching while Julia (perhaps a “double” who represents what Miriam could be if she were more open?) takes her place. Despite these being intensely personal novels of feminine identity formation, I find myself strongly relating to and identifying with Miriam: her struggle to understand the purpose in life; her desire to both connect with and keep at a distance the noisy world of suffering and banality; her inability to find solace in institutions (familial, religious, educational); and her perspective as a “disappointed idealist” who is an "outsider" perhaps in her own mind more so than in her outward interactions. Unlike the more male-centric "outsider" novels from the 19th and 20th centuries, from Atala to Steppenwolf, Richardson presents not a melodramatic woe-is-me lament, but rather a more intensely withdrawn portrait of "quiet desperation" yearning to find equilibrium.
I love this character, and I look forward to seeing where Richardson takes her.
October 22, 2017
The adventures of Miriam continue in the second installation of the pilgrimage. For sure Dorothy M. Richardson (DMR) still got it going on.
The theme on silence persists in the book and how gloriously silence has been exemplified. Majestically introduced in the first chapter... in the little drawing room "the little drawing-room was very quiet with the strange old-fashioned quietness" It is as if DMR is pointing us back to silence in all respects and saying without silence there is nothing. I will point out a few examples of how silence crept in the book….
“The sisters talked quietly, outlining their needs in smooth gentle voices, in small broken phrases, frequently interrupting and correcting each other”
“Listen to the dewy stillness of the garden”
“Streaming in through the madras muslin curtains, everything in the room very silent and distinct; nothing to be heard but the little flutterings of birds under the caves”
“I never have been able to stand a sudden noise. It’s torture to me to walk along a platform where a train may suddenly shriek”
“All things men have invented, trains and canons and things make a frightful noise”
“Make her play the romance first and then the Cavatina without talking in between”
Phrases
“Extracting the stone from a prune”
“Do not lump down on your heels..”
“A family that revels in plumes and hearses...”
“That bright yellow colour meant liver” – Describing sickness...
“vivacious intentness”
“Unhurried exactitude”
“Unnatural infatuation”
“Crimsoning”
“Come to tea”
“far reaching meadows, park-land, deer, the great silent heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill, softness of the sky, harsh streetiness, char womanishness, smarmy, churchy or chapelish sentimentality”
“Humming shreds of a violin obligato”
Stream of consciousness
"Ahead of her, at the end of the long drive, lay 3 sunlit weeks, bright mow in the certainty of the shadow that lay beyond them"
“The room was full of whirling forms swelling and shrinking as they crossed and recrossed the line between the clear vision rimmed by her glasses and the surrounding bright confusion”
Miriam gets into a sort of trance when having bread and reasons “it could be a good thing if she could decide never to have more than two slices...but every slice seems to be better than the last...” she notices the three hollow teeth... wow! And how mouthfuls of solid bread would sort of pad them...
“flower filled garden crowded up against the windows, anything to come out triumphantly together at the end and to stop satisfied...”
Books
There is so much to say about books ... no doubt DMR was keen about reading and books for that matter.
“Line upon line” and the “pilgrim’s progress” were not meant for modern minds
Quotables
“I say, somebody’s been using the ‘Financial Times’ to cut up flowers on. It’s all wet.”
“Good manners and civility make everybody lovely”
“no man could endure a woman’s silence”
“free press that Milton had gone to prison for”
“Flies don’t buzz, …. Why do people say they buzz?”
“She doesn’t approve of general conversation”
“one can always criticize a sermon”
“positively dangerous.. it means leaving your mind open for whatever they choose to say like Rome”
“If you listen only for the good the good will come to you”
“How can people, ordinary people, be expected to be like Christ, as they say, when they think Christ was supernatural?”
“If you can’t have what you like you must like what you have”
“Basement rooms are awfully bad”
“Women are made to find and dispense happiness”
“Even the sunlight paid sort of homage to the fathomless certainty she felt.”
“Life’s like Robinson Crusoe….anything might happen any minute….”
Music
How Miriam talks and experiences music looks like something to live for. She feels the music and loves playing the piano
“After a while everything was dissolved, past and future and present...”
“ceelo –like notes the devout theme of the lyric, Miriam drifted to an extremity of happiness”
The only music we talk about when DMR is at it is classical music. A bit of waltz......maybe....that is the general drift...
Descriptives
North Londoners spoke sideways with a snarling curl of one half of the upper lip and have that resentful way of speaking..
“a fly was hovering about the muslin window blind with little reedy loops of song...”
“The Englishman puts a dirty shirt on a clean body, and the Frenchman a clean shirt on a dirt body”
“Madras muslin curtains”
“German blue eyes”
Similes
“Looking fragile like the alabaster chapelle in the nursery with a candle alight inside.”
“Upright as a dart”
Paradox - “surrounding bright confusion”
Tea seems to have been a tradition of the English and the Germans as well. I like how they eve had tea- time reading to emphasize on how important tea was.
Sarcasm – “cheese how could people eat cheese?”
I like how there was an Ode to men ... “someone ought to prevent the extravagance of keeping whole houses and fires going for women like that”
Interesting to note how Miriam defines faith as just an abnormal condition of the mind with fanaticism on one end and agnosticism on the other... well I sure hope that this was not DMR projecting her faith through Miriam because if that was the case then she got it twisted. The definition of faith according to the Bible is substance of things unseen and hoped for..Maybe she hoped to have a philosophical debate. True bias is seen when she is feisty to consult with “people of faith” who beg the whole question from beginning.
DMR also subscribes to the school of thought that author’s books should be printed and read post-humous; very interesting to note.
I doubt this is how refreshment is defined... “to dance with a girl who can talk sense and doesn’t giggle”
Skewed English – Little darlings, gels...
As regards that smoking scene....I look at it as rebellion from the norm. Someone can wake up one day and decide to smoke without coughing? I think it is juxtaposition as to a woman rolling her tobacco and the morning world gleamed back at her....
Figure of speech – Pink anemones (go figure)
A classic read!
The theme on silence persists in the book and how gloriously silence has been exemplified. Majestically introduced in the first chapter... in the little drawing room "the little drawing-room was very quiet with the strange old-fashioned quietness" It is as if DMR is pointing us back to silence in all respects and saying without silence there is nothing. I will point out a few examples of how silence crept in the book….
“The sisters talked quietly, outlining their needs in smooth gentle voices, in small broken phrases, frequently interrupting and correcting each other”
“Listen to the dewy stillness of the garden”
“Streaming in through the madras muslin curtains, everything in the room very silent and distinct; nothing to be heard but the little flutterings of birds under the caves”
“I never have been able to stand a sudden noise. It’s torture to me to walk along a platform where a train may suddenly shriek”
“All things men have invented, trains and canons and things make a frightful noise”
“Make her play the romance first and then the Cavatina without talking in between”
Phrases
“Extracting the stone from a prune”
“Do not lump down on your heels..”
“A family that revels in plumes and hearses...”
“That bright yellow colour meant liver” – Describing sickness...
“vivacious intentness”
“Unhurried exactitude”
“Unnatural infatuation”
“Crimsoning”
“Come to tea”
“far reaching meadows, park-land, deer, the great silent heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill, softness of the sky, harsh streetiness, char womanishness, smarmy, churchy or chapelish sentimentality”
“Humming shreds of a violin obligato”
Stream of consciousness
"Ahead of her, at the end of the long drive, lay 3 sunlit weeks, bright mow in the certainty of the shadow that lay beyond them"
“The room was full of whirling forms swelling and shrinking as they crossed and recrossed the line between the clear vision rimmed by her glasses and the surrounding bright confusion”
Miriam gets into a sort of trance when having bread and reasons “it could be a good thing if she could decide never to have more than two slices...but every slice seems to be better than the last...” she notices the three hollow teeth... wow! And how mouthfuls of solid bread would sort of pad them...
“flower filled garden crowded up against the windows, anything to come out triumphantly together at the end and to stop satisfied...”
Books
There is so much to say about books ... no doubt DMR was keen about reading and books for that matter.
“Line upon line” and the “pilgrim’s progress” were not meant for modern minds
Quotables
“I say, somebody’s been using the ‘Financial Times’ to cut up flowers on. It’s all wet.”
“Good manners and civility make everybody lovely”
“no man could endure a woman’s silence”
“free press that Milton had gone to prison for”
“Flies don’t buzz, …. Why do people say they buzz?”
“She doesn’t approve of general conversation”
“one can always criticize a sermon”
“positively dangerous.. it means leaving your mind open for whatever they choose to say like Rome”
“If you listen only for the good the good will come to you”
“How can people, ordinary people, be expected to be like Christ, as they say, when they think Christ was supernatural?”
“If you can’t have what you like you must like what you have”
“Basement rooms are awfully bad”
“Women are made to find and dispense happiness”
“Even the sunlight paid sort of homage to the fathomless certainty she felt.”
“Life’s like Robinson Crusoe….anything might happen any minute….”
Music
How Miriam talks and experiences music looks like something to live for. She feels the music and loves playing the piano
“After a while everything was dissolved, past and future and present...”
“ceelo –like notes the devout theme of the lyric, Miriam drifted to an extremity of happiness”
The only music we talk about when DMR is at it is classical music. A bit of waltz......maybe....that is the general drift...
Descriptives
North Londoners spoke sideways with a snarling curl of one half of the upper lip and have that resentful way of speaking..
“a fly was hovering about the muslin window blind with little reedy loops of song...”
“The Englishman puts a dirty shirt on a clean body, and the Frenchman a clean shirt on a dirt body”
“Madras muslin curtains”
“German blue eyes”
Similes
“Looking fragile like the alabaster chapelle in the nursery with a candle alight inside.”
“Upright as a dart”
Paradox - “surrounding bright confusion”
Tea seems to have been a tradition of the English and the Germans as well. I like how they eve had tea- time reading to emphasize on how important tea was.
Sarcasm – “cheese how could people eat cheese?”
I like how there was an Ode to men ... “someone ought to prevent the extravagance of keeping whole houses and fires going for women like that”
Interesting to note how Miriam defines faith as just an abnormal condition of the mind with fanaticism on one end and agnosticism on the other... well I sure hope that this was not DMR projecting her faith through Miriam because if that was the case then she got it twisted. The definition of faith according to the Bible is substance of things unseen and hoped for..Maybe she hoped to have a philosophical debate. True bias is seen when she is feisty to consult with “people of faith” who beg the whole question from beginning.
DMR also subscribes to the school of thought that author’s books should be printed and read post-humous; very interesting to note.
I doubt this is how refreshment is defined... “to dance with a girl who can talk sense and doesn’t giggle”
Skewed English – Little darlings, gels...
As regards that smoking scene....I look at it as rebellion from the norm. Someone can wake up one day and decide to smoke without coughing? I think it is juxtaposition as to a woman rolling her tobacco and the morning world gleamed back at her....
Figure of speech – Pink anemones (go figure)
A classic read!
February 11, 2025
4.5
Ok, I'm fully invested now, but things are getting complicated. No reason for me to be surprised that a book written in 1916 and set in the late 19th century will come with racist language and antisemitic cliché. The question is: Is this Dorothy Richardson describing Miriam's teenage bigotry, or is this the author reproducing her own prejudice?
Things point to the former, because when Miriam encounters the Black minstrel singers with her sister and her sister's fiancé, it's obvious that these two have a far more open and unprejudiced attitude towards the artists than Miriam does, and Richardson is careful to stress this contrast in attitude. The same seems to be true when it comes to Miriam condescendingly thinking about "a Jewess" among her pupils: the way Miriam thinks about the children at her school is used by Richardson to reflect Miriam's at times very narrow-minded but evolving worldview, especially Miriam's prejudice about religion and class.
Still, it makes for unpleasant, jarring reading within an utterly spellbinding book.
Ok, I'm fully invested now, but things are getting complicated. No reason for me to be surprised that a book written in 1916 and set in the late 19th century will come with racist language and antisemitic cliché. The question is: Is this Dorothy Richardson describing Miriam's teenage bigotry, or is this the author reproducing her own prejudice?
Things point to the former, because when Miriam encounters the Black minstrel singers with her sister and her sister's fiancé, it's obvious that these two have a far more open and unprejudiced attitude towards the artists than Miriam does, and Richardson is careful to stress this contrast in attitude. The same seems to be true when it comes to Miriam condescendingly thinking about "a Jewess" among her pupils: the way Miriam thinks about the children at her school is used by Richardson to reflect Miriam's at times very narrow-minded but evolving worldview, especially Miriam's prejudice about religion and class.
Still, it makes for unpleasant, jarring reading within an utterly spellbinding book.
February 22, 2021
The second in Richardson’s modernist, stream-of-consciousness novels about an English girl who has to become a teacher because her family has fallen on hard times. There are thirteen of these books and the series is called Pilgrimage. Last time she was working at a German boarding school, and this time she is at an English school. I love the way the main character Miriam’s mind works. Her romantic mooniness is so real and relatable. The most touching part was when she discovers a lending library where she can read the complete works of Ouida, which have always been forbidden to her because they’re too smutty. This novel really shows how when you have a rich inner life you will find splendor and meaning somewhere, even in the most depressing or banal surroundings. Unfortunately there’s a section when she’s on holiday at the seaside and there are some musicians who are described with the n-word repeatedly.
March 31, 2025
I like Miriam. I sympathise with her determination amidst all sorts of self-doubt, her worries for the future, her lack of confidence. Having returned from Germany, she still needs to be earn her way and so takes a job at a small school for girls, where her frustrations during term time are counterbalanced by the joys of holidays back at home. She comes across as a very genuine person, which seems to me is the result of Richardson's stream-of consciousness technique. It's working for me so far, but as this is only the second instalment of Richardson's epic, I'll not make too many claims for it yet.
September 11, 2020
reading Richardson in 2020 we can notice for the first time all the things that would become a typical novel's language and psychology, but compressed, in miniature, forgotten
September 11, 2009
This novel (the second in Richardson's "Pilgrimage" series) operates by contrast. First, of course, it contrasts with Pointed Roofs, in which Miriam also teaches at a girl's school, but the two schools are very different. At the institution run by the Misses Pernes, she dilikes the girls, is physically uncomfortable, and finds no nourishment for the soul (until she discovers a circulating library and devours Ouida!) Yet there is little or no nostalgia for Germany in this book. Rather, the yearning is for the setting(s) of the other part of this story: home, her sisters, her friends. It's a world of luxury, comfort, music, dancing, silliness, lovemaking and, most of all, freedom. It's a world where she goes to a seaside resort and luxuriates in the beauty of nature, even as she is despising her companions. However, it is also a world full of disturbing developments - two of her sisters get engaged, her mother becomes seriously ill, and they must, perforce, leave their family home at last because of lack of money. Miriam begins to feel trapped in her role as schoolteacher - she is beginning to believe that she can no longer continue to do it as an amateur, and will be pressured to qualify, and thus (by implication) to spend the rest of her life trapped in schools like the Pernes' in North London. One of the implicit alternatives to this is marriage, and a number of possible and very different candidates are paraded across Miriam's landscape in this volume: Ted, from her own social circle; Max, whose attractiveness she only half allows herself to admit before he goes off to New York and dies of influenza; the older, stable man named Bob; the curiously solitary Mr. Parrow who seems to disgust her, but then opens out her self-imposed limits by taking her on a toboggan ride at the Crystal Palace. The stream-of-consciousness style grows bolder in this one, and is used to suggest a number of self-revelations. Most notable among these are Miriam's shock at the end of the book when she discovers how much she is loved and appreciated at the North London school which she has gladly left behind, and a moment when the weight of her "amateur" status in a professionalizing world leads her to thoughts of uselessness and suicide, followed closely by a triumphant affirmation of her own identity. However, though Miriam is very aware, she is not terribly self-aware of self-analytical. She rarely thinks about what she is thinking, or what its relationship is to the world around her. She rarely examines her own first principles, and in fact I find her snobbishness and assumption of class superiority one of the most disturbing and off-putting aspects of her character. I did like the Ouida section, though. "She ceased to read the Bible and to pray. Ouida, Ouida, she would muse, with the book at last in her hands. I want bad things -- strong, bad things... It doesn't matter, Italy, the sky, bright hot landscapes, things happening. I don't care what people think or say. I am older than anyone here in this house. I am myself." Yes, I remember this. A true antidote for conventional religiosity like Miss Haddie's! [These notes made in 1992:]
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