Dorothy M. Richardson (1873–1957)
Author of Pilgrimage I: Pointed Roofs / Backwater / Honeycomb
About the Author
Series
Works by Dorothy M. Richardson
Pilgrimage IV: Oberland; Dawn's Left Hand; Clear Horizon; Dimple Hill; March Moonlight (1967) 104 copies, 3 reviews
The Book Of Blanche 2 copies
Associated Works
British Women Writers: An Anthology from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (1989) — Contributor — 61 copies, 1 review
Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies, 1 review
Contact collection of contemporary writers — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Odle, Dorothy Miller Richardson
- Birthdate
- 1873-05-17
- Date of death
- 1957-06-17
- Gender
- female
- Education
- finishing school
- Occupations
- novelist
feminist
essayist
short story writer
journalist
governess (show all 7)
dental office worker - Relationships
- Wells, H. G. (lover)
Odle, Alan Elsden (husband)
Odle, Edwin Vincent (brother-in-law) - Short biography
- Dorothy Miller Richardson spent her childhood and youth in secluded surroundings in late Victorian England. Her family was genteel but impoverished. Her schooling ended at age 17 when she had to start earning a living. She became a governess and teacher. After her mother's death in 1895, Dorothy moved to London and went to work as a secretary/assistant to a Harley Street dentist. She began moving in avant-garde artistic and political circles, including the Bloomsbury Set. She wrote essays, poems, and short stories, which she first published in 1902, translations of other works from German and French, and worked as a freelance journalist. In 1917, she married artist Alan Elsden Odle, who was 15 years her junior and a distinctly Bohemian figure. Dorothy M. Richardson is best known for her ambitious, pioneering stream-of-consciousness novel Pilgrimage, published sequentially in separate volumes — she preferred to call them chapters — as 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 in four volumes in 1938. Dorothy Richardson called for equal rights for women, and the female point-of-view was the subject matter of her books. She called her fiction works "feminine prose." She died in poverty in 1957.
- Nationality
- England
UK - Birthplace
- Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Hanover, England, UK
Putney, London, England, UK
Worthing, West Sussex, England, UK
London, England, UK
Beckenham, Kent, England, UK - Place of death
- Beckenham, Kent, England, UK
- Map Location
- UK
Members
Discussions
Pilgrimage Year-long read in 2019 Category Challenge (March 2020)
Group Read: Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, vol 4 (Oberland; Dawn's Left Hand; Clear Horizon; Dimple Hill; March Moonl in Virago Modern Classics (January 2017)
Group Read: Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, vol 3 (Deadlock, Revolving Lights, The Trap) in Virago Modern Classics (August 2016)
Group Read: Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, vol 2 (The Tunnel, Interim) in Virago Modern Classics (April 2016)
Group Read: Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, vol 1 (Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb) in Virago Modern Classics (February 2016)
Reviews
This is the second book in Pilgrimage, a set of 13 novellas published by Virago in 4 volumes. Author Dorothy Richardson pioneered the stream of consciousness form in telling the life story of Miriam Henderson. In the first book, Pointed Roofs, Henderson’s family falls on difficult financial times and 17-year-old Miriam obtains a teaching position in a German girls’ school. It’s a formative if unhappy experience; Backwater opens after her return to England, where she is about to take up show more a new post in a small girls’ school in London.
Miriam’s delight at being reunited with her sisters jumps off the early pages of this book, as does her enthusiasm for her new teaching position. But since the reader is privy to all of Miriam’s thoughts, we are also keenly aware of her feelings of awkwardness, self-doubt, and isolation. Her relationships with men are tentative and uncertain, but she seems to accept that even as her sisters pair off and become engaged. While she becomes a more confident teacher, she also yearns for something better, but undefined. She’s thrilled to discover newspapers, which she squirrels away in her room to read in secret. And she’s positively euphoric when she stumbles across a library near the school, and begins devouring every book in sight. Miriam’s summer holidays see her reunited with her sisters, enjoying long warm sunny days but perhaps living somewhat beyond their means. Near the end of this novel, financial pressures become more acute, Miriam’s mother’s health is threatened, and Miriam once again feels compelled to find a different form of employment.
I am really enjoying Richardson’s writing, and taking this in approximately 150-page increments is working well for me. show less
Miriam’s delight at being reunited with her sisters jumps off the early pages of this book, as does her enthusiasm for her new teaching position. But since the reader is privy to all of Miriam’s thoughts, we are also keenly aware of her feelings of awkwardness, self-doubt, and isolation. Her relationships with men are tentative and uncertain, but she seems to accept that even as her sisters pair off and become engaged. While she becomes a more confident teacher, she also yearns for something better, but undefined. She’s thrilled to discover newspapers, which she squirrels away in her room to read in secret. And she’s positively euphoric when she stumbles across a library near the school, and begins devouring every book in sight. Miriam’s summer holidays see her reunited with her sisters, enjoying long warm sunny days but perhaps living somewhat beyond their means. Near the end of this novel, financial pressures become more acute, Miriam’s mother’s health is threatened, and Miriam once again feels compelled to find a different form of employment.
I am really enjoying Richardson’s writing, and taking this in approximately 150-page increments is working well for me. show less
The last of the four chunks into which Pilgrimage is usually divided takes us through five short novels and brings Miriam's story up to mid-1909, so that we leave her when she's had her first pieces of fiction accepted by magazines and has started work on a novel.
Oberland takes up the story directly from where we left it in The Trap, with Miriam on holiday for a couple of weeks in a ski-resort that sounds rather like Mürren or Wengen, but she gives it the generic name "Oberland", a word show more which in the following books becomes a metaphor for the sort of English upper-class life that involves looking down from a great height on the peasants in the valley below.
In Dawn's left hand and Clear horizon she's back in London, still working for the dentists but now back with Mrs Bailey again, the flat-share with Selina having been declared a failure. She's stalked by a new character, a lovely, somewhat theatrical young woman called Amabel, who won't take no for an answer, but soon transfers her passion for Miriam into suffragette activism, and has to be visited in Holloway. Meanwhile, the affair with "Hypo" (Wells) comes to its predictable conclusion in the whitespace between two paragraphs (in the first they are eating soup, in the second they are putting their clothes back on), leaving her feeling somewhat battered.
In Dimple Hill, Miriam follows her doctor's advice to take six months off: after misleading us with a delightfully irrelevant parody of the opening page of an E M Forster novel (three women disagree about the proper way to visit a cathedral; an enigmatic young man, never seen again, sits in the corner of a railway carriage reading what may be a missal) Miriam finds herself staying with a Quaker family in a country house in Sussex. There's a kind of Northanger Abbey thing going on as Miriam is gently but firmly made to align her idealised preconceptions about Quakers with reality, but it's all done in the gentlest possible way, and she is left still very drawn to their way of life. (And to the idea of marrying one of them...). I think this was my favourite part of the whole sequence.
The last part, March Moonlight, is also one of the shortest, and it is probably the hardest of all to read, since Richardson has refined her technique down so far that almost all the redundant information that normally guides us through a narrative has gone. We have to struggle with working out who the characters are, there are frequent unannounced changes of setting, the present-tense "I" voice is taking over more and more of the work from the impersonal narrator, Miriam makes serious plans for her life that are upset at the last minute and abandoned without further discussion, and it all feels as though it's happening at frantic speed. It's impressive writing, but not fun in the way Dimple Hill was.
Still, overall, this was a fantastic novel, one I wish I'd known about much sooner. And I'm definitely going to have to re-read it sooner or later! show less
Oberland takes up the story directly from where we left it in The Trap, with Miriam on holiday for a couple of weeks in a ski-resort that sounds rather like Mürren or Wengen, but she gives it the generic name "Oberland", a word show more which in the following books becomes a metaphor for the sort of English upper-class life that involves looking down from a great height on the peasants in the valley below.
In Dawn's left hand and Clear horizon she's back in London, still working for the dentists but now back with Mrs Bailey again, the flat-share with Selina having been declared a failure. She's stalked by a new character, a lovely, somewhat theatrical young woman called Amabel, who won't take no for an answer, but soon transfers her passion for Miriam into suffragette activism, and has to be visited in Holloway. Meanwhile, the affair with "Hypo" (Wells) comes to its predictable conclusion in the whitespace between two paragraphs (in the first they are eating soup, in the second they are putting their clothes back on), leaving her feeling somewhat battered.
In Dimple Hill, Miriam follows her doctor's advice to take six months off: after misleading us with a delightfully irrelevant parody of the opening page of an E M Forster novel (three women disagree about the proper way to visit a cathedral; an enigmatic young man, never seen again, sits in the corner of a railway carriage reading what may be a missal) Miriam finds herself staying with a Quaker family in a country house in Sussex. There's a kind of Northanger Abbey thing going on as Miriam is gently but firmly made to align her idealised preconceptions about Quakers with reality, but it's all done in the gentlest possible way, and she is left still very drawn to their way of life. (And to the idea of marrying one of them...). I think this was my favourite part of the whole sequence.
The last part, March Moonlight, is also one of the shortest, and it is probably the hardest of all to read, since Richardson has refined her technique down so far that almost all the redundant information that normally guides us through a narrative has gone. We have to struggle with working out who the characters are, there are frequent unannounced changes of setting, the present-tense "I" voice is taking over more and more of the work from the impersonal narrator, Miriam makes serious plans for her life that are upset at the last minute and abandoned without further discussion, and it all feels as though it's happening at frantic speed. It's impressive writing, but not fun in the way Dimple Hill was.
Still, overall, this was a fantastic novel, one I wish I'd known about much sooner. And I'm definitely going to have to re-read it sooner or later! show less
These two parts of the cycle, published in February and December 1919, follow on directly from each other, with no real break. Miriam moves into lodgings in the St Pancras area and is working as assistant to a posh dentist in Wimpole Street. Money is tight, but nonetheless she's enjoying the life of the independent working woman and exploring what the capital has to offer: she goes to concerts and galleries, visits artist friends, sees Henry Irving playing Shakespeare and hears Lord Kelvin show more lecturing on colour photography (I suspect she's got this last one mixed up: it was Gabriel Lippmann who developed a colour photography process in the 1890s, and he gave a paper on the subject at the Royal Institution in April 1896; Kelvin was supposed to be lecturing but was unable to attend). She takes lessons at a cycling-school, acquires some cycling knickers, and — after the inevitable wobbly start — is ravished to discover the joy of solitary bike-rides.
Potentially interesting men flutter about and then flutter away again — her dentist boss briefly shows an interest and then embarrassingly draws back when he's warned off by his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, and then in Interim there's a whole house full of eligible Canadian junior doctors she wastes by gadding about with the much more amusing, but not in the least eligible, M. Mendizzable. Female friendship is a little more rewarding: there are splendidly girly nights-in eating ragout irlandaise in Mag and Jan's flat, there is Christmas with some of her North London friends from Backwater, and there are arty expeditions with Miss Szigmondy. But her sister Eve's brief attempt to work in London is a disappointment, and there is also the appallingly needy Miss Dear, forever getting into embarrassments and expecting her friends to bail her out.
A book absolutely bubbling with youthful energy, full of gushing reflections on this, that and the other: it's hard to imagine how Richardson managed to recapture the feeling of being twenty and open to everything life might throw at her in the postwar glumness of 1919. Mrs Dalloway on speed, perhaps... But enormous fun to read. show less
Potentially interesting men flutter about and then flutter away again — her dentist boss briefly shows an interest and then embarrassingly draws back when he's warned off by his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, and then in Interim there's a whole house full of eligible Canadian junior doctors she wastes by gadding about with the much more amusing, but not in the least eligible, M. Mendizzable. Female friendship is a little more rewarding: there are splendidly girly nights-in eating ragout irlandaise in Mag and Jan's flat, there is Christmas with some of her North London friends from Backwater, and there are arty expeditions with Miss Szigmondy. But her sister Eve's brief attempt to work in London is a disappointment, and there is also the appallingly needy Miss Dear, forever getting into embarrassments and expecting her friends to bail her out.
A book absolutely bubbling with youthful energy, full of gushing reflections on this, that and the other: it's hard to imagine how Richardson managed to recapture the feeling of being twenty and open to everything life might throw at her in the postwar glumness of 1919. Mrs Dalloway on speed, perhaps... But enormous fun to read. show less
I feel like Richardson has really hit her stride in this 4th installment of Pilgrimage. Miriam's mother has died and she has struck out on her own, away from the traditional governess scene. Instead, Miriam gets a "room of her own" (yes she uses this term a decade before Woolf) in London and works as a secretary for a dental office. The descriptions of her office work are amusing as she tries to keep on top of everything. But, the real interest here is Miriam discovering London, going to show more concerts, and reading avidly. She wanders and bikes!! around London, meeting new people and observing the city. In her musings a streak of feminism is becoming more and more prevalent. She notices the limiting expectations on women and the differences between the sexes.
I was so struck in this novel that Virginia Woolf must have been influenced by this work. Miriam being out in London reminded me of Clarissa Dalloway and the importance of Miriam's own space both within her flat and in claiming London is also a prevalent them in Woolf's later work.
Richardson has come up with a unique style. It is all Miriam's point of view and to keep that narrow focus characters flit in and out, sometimes without much explanation of who they are. I think this was Richardson's way of keeping Miriam the focus, but it does make for challenging reading.
I'm really impressed with this work and so glad to be reading it.
In the 5th novel of Richardson's Pilgrimage, Miriam mainly observes others. Particularly noticeable was her rendering of different accents and pronunciations of the people she meets. This was spot on and amusing. There are new boarders in the house with her that provide a lot of this observation.
Also, her sister leaves her governess job with the Greens for a job in the city and her own apartment, presumably following in Miriam's footsteps. This doesn't work out for her, though, and she's back to governess-ing by the end of the novel. I'm sure this gives Miriam some personal satisfaction, that she can survive in London on her own despite it not being easy.
Miriam also gets her own bike - exciting! - and even more freedom. show less
I was so struck in this novel that Virginia Woolf must have been influenced by this work. Miriam being out in London reminded me of Clarissa Dalloway and the importance of Miriam's own space both within her flat and in claiming London is also a prevalent them in Woolf's later work.
Richardson has come up with a unique style. It is all Miriam's point of view and to keep that narrow focus characters flit in and out, sometimes without much explanation of who they are. I think this was Richardson's way of keeping Miriam the focus, but it does make for challenging reading.
I'm really impressed with this work and so glad to be reading it.
In the 5th novel of Richardson's Pilgrimage, Miriam mainly observes others. Particularly noticeable was her rendering of different accents and pronunciations of the people she meets. This was spot on and amusing. There are new boarders in the house with her that provide a lot of this observation.
Also, her sister leaves her governess job with the Greens for a job in the city and her own apartment, presumably following in Miriam's footsteps. This doesn't work out for her, though, and she's back to governess-ing by the end of the novel. I'm sure this gives Miriam some personal satisfaction, that she can survive in London on her own despite it not being easy.
Miriam also gets her own bike - exciting! - and even more freedom. show less
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- Also by
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- Popularity
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- Rating
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- Reviews
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- ISBNs
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