Dorothy M. RichardsonRecensioni

Alas, it didn't take long for me to feel underwhelmed. Wikipedia also states that Richardson (1873-1957), is also considered an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. I try not to be disloyal to the Sisterhood but while I agree that any experiences can be a subject for literature, they must be rendered sufficiently interesting to maintain the attention of the reader. I could not muster the slightest interest in Miriam Henderson and the petty dramas of the German boarding-school where she becomes a governess.

Yes, I was bored by Pointed Roofs.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/01/26/pointed-roofs-pilgrimage-1-by-dorothy-richar...

Another top book of 1915 by an author I’d never even heard of. Dorothy Richardson is a modernist writer, and one of the first to use interior monologues or “stream of consciousness.” Pointed Roofs is about a shy, awkward English girl whose father has lost all his money, so she goes to Germany to become a teacher in a girls’ finishing school. (All this really happened to Richardson.) Of course it reminded me a little bit of Villette, and the nice part is it reminds the main character of Villette too. The novel had such a natural, authentic-feeling flow. It is so refreshing and inspiring to read the thoughts and feelings of a girl, treated with such seriousness and depth. I feel like even in contemporary literature, men’s feelings are serious business and women’s feelings are chick lit, so for Richardson to have pulled this off in 1915 fills me with profound respect and gratitude. I really liked how the main character was able to relax and play the piano better once she got to the German school; it seems like just being British is a huge handicap to emotional and artistic development. The interplay between the girls at the school seemed very realistic. Everything that happened was realistic! Because Richardson was presenting such a slice of life, there were more things that I had no idea what the hell they were than in other books of 1915, because she was talking about products and fads of the day without explaining what they were. This may mark me as an incredibly shallow person, but one of the most interesting parts was when the main character Miriam is forced to have her hair washed when “Miriam’s hair had never been washed with anything but cantharides and rose-water on a tiny special sponge.” To her horror, hair washing involves having a raw egg cracked onto her hair. In some ways 1915 is just like today; in other ways it’s like another planet. I’m pleased there are many more books to come by Richardson.

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.

120/2020. Set in the early 1890s, the protagonist is a 17 year old unreliable narrator who has accepted a teaching scholarship at a German finishing school because she wanted to travel and get away from her middle-middle-class family, but who has persuaded herself that she's saving her family money (despite the cost of her new clothes etc, new travelling trunk, return travel, return travel for her father as escort, 25 shillings spending money, and whatever other expenses she incurred that she's not telling). Readers are probably supposed to credit her misrepresentations as "innocence" about the world rather than selfish fibs. There's also the subtext that her father likes to travel, and she takes after him, and a son would be expected to travel so why shouldn't she? Especially as she's been indoctrinated towards upper middle class snobbery by a family without the income or social network to support that worldview.

Hmm: ' "[...] all the expense of my going to Germany and coming back is less than what it would have cost to keep me at home for the five months I’ve been there — I wish you’d tell everybody that." '

The writing is beautiful in a "continuous state of being" style (aka stream of consciousness). Dorothy Richardson seems to have thought of it as a sort of women's language, a feminised version of the normative realist literary expression fashionable at the time of writing. Whatever it is, it works for me (and better than several of the author's peers who are more famous because they wrote about subjects of greater general interest to average readers).

Pedants' corner: 'Pater had always been worrying about slang and careless pronunciation. None of them ever said "cut in half" or "very unique" or "ho’sale" or "phodygraff." ' [halve, unique, wholesale, and phonograph]

The style of the text in which this is embedded demonstrates a telling juxtaposition of Pater's linguistic pedantry with the author's artistic freedom of expression.

Clothes often appear as explorations of women's expected roles in society, and I was especially struck by the instruction from Miriam's dressmaker not to take deep breaths so she could wear a tighter-fitting bodice, then the contrast between fainting from corset tight-lacing and the freedom of playing tennis in stays. All this is presented as experienced rather than observed and interpreted, which is effective at a deeper level than intellectual arguments for feminism (different approaches, of course, being complementary). It's also fascinating history of women's clothing.

On the newly fashionable mass ready-made "blouse" for middle-class women (previously a garment mostly worn by working class men): 'Her blouses came at the beginning of the week. She carried them upstairs. Her hands took them incredulously from their wrappages. The "squashed strawberry" lay at the top, soft warm clear madder-rose, covered with a black arabesque of tiny leaves and tendrils. It was compactly folded, showing only its turned-down collar, shoulders and breast. She laid it on her bed side by side with its buff companion and shook out the underlying skirt.... How sweet of them to send her the things ... she felt tears in her eyes as she stood at her small looking-glass with the skirt against her body and the blouses held in turn above it ... they both went perfectly with the light skirt.... She unfolded them and shook them out and held them up at arms’ length by the shoulder seams. Her heart sank. They were not in the least like anything she had ever worn. They had no shape. They were square and the sleeves were like bags. She turned them about and remembered the shapeliness of the stockinette jerseys smocked and small and clinging that she had worn at school. If these were blouses then she would never be able to wear blouses.... "They’re so flountery!" she said, frowning at them. She tried on the rose-coloured one. It startled her with its brightness.... "It’s no good, it’s no good," she said, as her hands fumbled for the fastenings. There was a hook at the neck; that was all. Frightful ... she fastened it, and the collar set in a soft roll but came down in front to the base of her neck. The rest of the blouse stuck out all round her ... "it’s got no cut ... they couldn’t have looked at it." ... She turned helplessly about, using her hand-glass, frowning and despairing. Presently she saw Harriett’s quizzical eyes and laughed woefully, tweaking at the outstanding margin of the material. "It’s all very well," she murmured angrily, "but it’s all I’ve got." ... She wished Sarah were there. Sarah would do something, alter it or something. She heard her encouraging voice saying, "You haven’t half got it on yet. It’ll be all right." She unfastened her black skirt, crammed the flapping margin within its band and put on the beaded black stuff belt.
The blouse bulged back and front shapelessly and seemed to be one with the shapeless sleeves which ended in hard loose bands riding untrimmed about her wrists with the movements of her hands.... "It’s like a nightdress," she said wrathfully and dragged the fulnesses down all round under her skirt. It looked better so in front; but as she turned with raised hand-glass it came riding up at the side and back with the movement of her arm.'

Alas for the aspiring gentlewoman who hasn't been taught to sew for herself because dressmaking is a trade....½

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 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!

At the start of Deadlock we're a year or two further on from where we left Miriam at the end of Interim — judging from some passing references to "Chamberlain" and "the war" it's probably 1899 — but she is still lodging with Mrs Bailey and working for the Wimpole Street dentists. Most of this book is about her growing friendship with her Russian fellow-lodger, Michael Shatov. She starts off by giving him some English lessons, at Mrs Bailey's suggestion, but they soon progress to long discussions of philosophy and literature (he gets her to read "Tourgainyeff and Tolstoi"), walks around London, and visits to lectures and meetings. Inevitably there is a sexual attraction that catches them unawares, but Shatov tells her his Zionist principles won't allow him to marry a non-Jew, and Miriam soon realises that her feminist principles won't allow her to embrace any variety of Judaism that would be Jewish enough for Shatov. For once we don't have to puzzle too much to work out where she got the title of this part from!

Revolving Lights sees Miriam invited to join a prestigious socialist group, the Lycurgans (=Fabians) and getting more deeply involved with Hypo Wilson (=H.G. Wells), as she makes some tentative steps into literary journalism herself. It starts to become obvious to the reader (if not necessarily to Miriam herself yet) that Hypo means rather more to her than a respected writer and the husband of her friend Alma. When another woman writer comes to stay with the Wilsons, the knives are out...

In The Trap, Miriam leaves the pleasantly bohemian world of the Baileys behind at last, joins a women's club, and moves into a flat with a fellow-member, Selina Holland, who turns out to be alarmingly respectable and spinsterish. Miriam's not altogether sure if she's made the right move, or how she can resolve the different worlds she moves in, but she does seem to be growing up.

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 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.

This last volume includes the five novels Oberland, Dawn's Left Hand, Clear Horizon, Dimple Hill and March Moonlight.

Oberland was different from all the rest of the Pilgrimage novels up to this point as it is about a vacation Miriam took to the Swiss Alps. Instead of going around London, this was focused on the natural beauty of Switzerland, with some focus on her interactions with the other people staying at the lodge. And her great love of tobogganing!

Dawn's Left Hand was kind a vague novel which had Miriam spending time with Hypo and his wife, and with Hypo alone, and also getting to know Amabel.

In Clear Horizon, Miriam continues her relationship with Amabel, meets with Michael again and introduces Amabel to Hypo. Amabel gets arrested while participating in the suffragette movement. Miriam asks a doctor she had turned down romantically for help with her sister, who is sick. The doctor confirm she needs surgery. Miriam is of course aghast as her sister and her husband have fallen on hard times and there is no money for an operation. The doctor has actually found another doctor who will perform the surgery for free and a Florence Nightingale Home where her sister can stay for practically nothing. Spoiler alert: The doctor also diagnoses Miriam with a nervous breakdown. It has been referenced from time to time that Miriam stays up all night, and gets up very early, and doesn't eat very well, and I guess this is what it has resulted in.

Dimple Hill sees Miriam taking a six-month sabbatical from work; she travels around and stays at several different hotels/boarding houses, at first traveling with friends, and then later staying with a family of Quakers that Michael recommended. She really enjoys her time there, practically becoming an honorary Quaker.

In the last novel, March Moonlight, which was published posthumously, Miriam takes a few breaks from Dimple Hill, the Quaker farm, to go back to London, to visit Amabel and Michael, and then when she goes back to Dimple Hill, she hears that someone else will be coming in September, an ex-Catholic priest, also suffering from a nervous breakdown. And in the meantime, Miriam needs to leave Dimple Hill for a while because Miss Rescorla will be away for a while - I guess she can't stay there if she's the only female? So Miriam stays in what I would characterize as a YWCA. When Miriam goes back to Dimple Hill, she finds that the French ex-Catholic priest, Charles, is already there. She takes the opportunity to speak French to Charles, which he really appreciates and she leaves her book, Modern Thought, out for him to discover, and they proceed to have lots of discussions about it. Spoiler alert: Charles declares his love for her, and she has to leave Dimple Hill because the Rescorlas won't let them both stay under the same roof after Charles tells them he loves her. Miriam confesses something to him (maybe about her affair with Hypo?) and she leaves and doesn't come back.

The end of the book has Miriam taking up lodging at another boarding house, with the plan to make her living by writing, and living very frugally.

My overall thoughts on the entire work:

Four books actually, and more than 2100 pages, of living inside Miriam Henderson's mind in this stream of consciousness work, encompassing 13 novels. I'm glad for the experience of reading this work, but it was not an easy or fast read. It was difficult to follow who was who and to actually understand at times what was happening. At the time of its publication (over several years), her critics didn't suspect it was based on the author's life. I had to read a lot of reference material to understand the actual events taking place

Full of excruciating detail of people, their clothes, houses, furniture, the London streets, and nature, it went very slowly, Still I was interested in what it was like for a single woman to live and work on her own in London in the early 1900s. To attend lectures, read, and learn and question others about philosophy, to travel to Switzerland, live with a Quaker family, fall in love and have men fall in love with her, and to always stay single and live as independently as possible.½

I really liked the sound of this book: a battle of wits between the victim's sister and the murderer. How very clever to write a book about a murder in order to trap the murderer, which Linda plans to do without ever leaving her home. A home that has become her self-inflicted prison and her whole world.

Linda Conrads is a reclusive author. She has chosen to live her life behind closed doors, never stepping over the threshold into the outside world for the last 11 years. A world that no longer contains her sister, Anna, who was brutally murdered 12 years ago. It was Linda who found her sister's body and also glimpsed the killer as he fled the scene. Now, 12 years later, Linda sees his face on TV reporting on a news story, so she hatches a plan to get Victor Lenzen to confess to Anna's murder. Linda writes a book about her sister's murder containing facts only the murderer will know and invites Lenzen to interview her about the new novel. Will Lenzen take the bait or is Linda's memory of events not as clear as she thought?

I absolutely rocketed through The Trap and thought it was really unusual to have a book within a book, as we are treated to chapters from Linda's new book. I didn't really warm to Linda, though. She seemed a bit one-dimensional as I never really felt as if I knew what she was feeling - perhaps something was lost in translation from German to English. The story itself, however, is tense and gripping as events unfold and a shadow is cast over Linda's memories - has she remembered events as they really happened, or is she remembering only what she wants to remember? Linda may be stuck inside her house but the reader was stuck inside Linda's head, sifting through the confusion to get to the truth.

I think The Trap is well worth reading as long as you remember that it has been translated from German, so the characters may not be as well developed as they might be in their mother tongue. If you're looking for a fast-paced, tense, mindbender then you'll love this, but will you be able to separate fact from fiction in The Trap?

I chose to read an ARC and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.

Pilgrimage was published as thirteen separate novels over a period of twenty years, but it's clearly meant to be read as a single work, in the same sort of way as À la recherche du temps perdu — Proust was two years older than Richardson, and oddly enough the first part of his book came out just two years before hers. In a preface written with hindsight in 1938, Richardson, with typical perversity, traces the ancestry of her project to the great realists, Balzac and Arnold Bennett. But she does also admit that there is an important parallel to what she is doing in Proust, and also cites Henry James as an important influence. But none of these, evidently, gave her a pattern for "a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism" (oddly, she doesn't mention the Brontës — too obvious to name, perhaps?). And neither did Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, the obvious parallels we would think of: they hadn't got going yet. A hint of D.H. Lawrence might have been in there somewhere, but he was ten years younger and only just getting going as well.

To all intents and purposes, Richardson was beating her own path into modernism, and it's an astonishingly straight and narrow one. However experimental and unregulated her syntax is, there's a rod of iron ruling the narrative structure. She never steps outside the head of her fictitious alter ego, Miriam, and she tells us about Miriam's perceptions of the world and her thoughts and experiences strictly in the order in which they enter her head. It's a stream of consciousness without any eddies or whirlpools. Unlike Proust, she never takes advantage of the 25-year gap between experience and writing to comment or analyse or fill in background details. She selects, of course, and we know it's a trick, but it often really feels as though you're looking at the world from the point of view of a teenager in the nineties and you don't know what's coming next.

1. Pointed Roofs (1915): It's early in 1891, and seventeen-year-old Miriam is off to Germany to work as an English assistant in Fräulein Pfaff's school for young ladies in Hanover. The school turns out to be everything but a serious educational establishment: there are only ten pupils, most of them about the same age as Miriam, and the only other staff member is "Mademoiselle", a French protestant teenager who seems to be almost as much out of her depth as Miriam. It's all rather closer to Villette than to Mädchen in Uniform, but Miriam doesn't quite fall for either the professor or the clingy younger girl.

Fräulein Pfaff decides capriciously when she gets up in the morning what the school is going to do that day — housekeeping, walks, excursions, an improvised concert — and Miriam is only rarely called on actually to teach. It's a pleasant life, but it peters out after the end of the first term, since Miriam doesn't have enough money to support herself in Germany through the holidays, and has to go home to her parents and sisters in Barnes.

2. Backwater (1916): Miriam has found a job nearer to home, in a school in North London. Not as much fun as Germany, and coming from Surrey she looks on Finsbury Park as practically the Arctic Circle, but it's a better-organised school and she likes her employers and builds up a bit of confidence in her teaching abilities. In between times, there's still her sisters' world of tennis clubs, dances, boating on the Thames and trips to the seaside, and the young men that go with all that. They still don't seem to be as important to Miriam as her life in the school, but she is beginning to notice them a bit more...

3. Honeycomb (1917): It's now early 1895 and the family finances have taken another turn for the worse, so Miriam has had to take a better-paid job, and is now governess to the children of a wealthy family somewhere in the Home Counties. She enjoys being on the fringe of the carefree late-Victorian country house life, but the Oscar Wilde trial is rumbling on in the background, and there are a lot of offstage worries in her own family — her father heading for bankruptcy, her mother seriously ill, and two of her sisters on the point of marrying. And it's all that that eventually forces her to give up the pleasant job at Newlands.

I liked the 3rd book in Pilgrimage the most so far. This book of three novels, Deadlock, Revolving Lights and The Trap focused on her relationship with Michael Shatov, a Russian student, as well the beginning of her relationship with Hypo, and with her new roommate. Miriam's love of London shines through, as we experience what it's like to live in London as an independent female in the early 20's.

Pilgrimage is a 13 volume, 2110 page novel published between 1915 and 1967. From what I’ve found it is currently out of print, but fairly easy to access through used copies of Virago Modern Classics which published the work in 4 volumes. Originally, each volume was published individually until Dimple Hill, the 12th volume. It and the final installment, March Moonlight, were only published in full volume sets.

Pilgrimage is highly autobiographical. It follows the interior thoughts and experiences of Miriam Henderson, a young woman starting out in the world. I believe it covers her life from about age 17-30. Miriam leaves her home when her family falls on hard times financially to become a teacher in Germany. She teaches in different locations for the first few novels and then becomes a secretary at a dental office in London. While in London, she truly finds her confidence in being an independent and single woman. She explores the city and finds a deep connection to the city itself. As the book progresses, she develops her skill as a writer, begins and ends relationships with several men, and travels, gaining a wide array of experience.

The plot in the novel is buried deep within Miriam’s experience. Her reactions and thoughts are always primary, sometimes (often) to the point that the plot is undiscernible. This can be frustrating. Characters come and go sometimes without introduction and even large life events aren’t spelled out. Both her mother’s death and her first sexual experience I had to go back pages later and say, wait - what???

As such, this is not an easy reading experience. The book meanders and definitely loses its way, especially, I felt, later in the work. I think that by about half way through these novels, Richardson knew NO ONE was reading anymore and was truly writing for herself. I wonder if anyone was editing at all. Also, the book is unfinished which feels frustrating at the end of 2000 pages. I’m not sure Richardson ever intended to stop writing Miriam’s life experience.

All that said, I still highly recommend reading this. I thought a lot of the writing and ideas were truly groundbreaking. I’ve never read anything quite like this, and I’ve read Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, some of Joyce so I did have plenty to compare it to as far as interior, stream of consciousness writing. At her best, Richardson writes beautifully and intelligently, with great insight into the female experience. There is a definite feminist slant to her writing. There are certain scenes (Miriam exploring London on bicycle) that I will never forget.

If I were to be honest, I think you can get an excellent feel for Richardson’s talent and importance by reading the first 4 novels in this series of 13. I recommend those without reservation. And if you are a completist like I am, then by all means, read the whole thing. But I definitely recommend trying this neglected novel. I think it deserves to be read.

Pilgrimage I encompasses the first three novels in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, 13 novels in four books. After I finished this volume, I read the introduction and foreword and gained a better understanding of why this work is important. I knew that it was one of the first works to use stream of consciousness; I didn't realize that although Richardson bills this as fiction, it closely follows her own life between 1891 and 1915.

The first novel, Pointed Roofs, has Miriam Henderson going to Germany to teach English in a school there. The second novel, Backwater, was pretty bleak - Miriam comes home and takes a job as a teacher which she doesn't like. She looks for another opportunity, and towards the end of the novel she is confident enough to leave the job at the school. Also her family is having financial difficulties; her father has to sell their home to help pay for her mother's care.

The third novel, Honeycomb, has Miriam going to work as a governess for a rich family in the country. Her two sisters get married. By reading the introduction and some other background information, I figured out that Miriam's mom passes away at the end of Honeycomb, but it's not that clear.

Reading this book was a bit of a slog; it was a slow as you might expect when stream of consciousness is used - everything Miriam sees and feels are described. I understand the importance of it, and reading Richardson's own foreword is helpful.

I'm committing to read all of Pilgrimage, so three more books and ten more novels to go!½

Pilgrimage 2 encompasses the fourth and fifth novels - The Tunnel and Interim. The Tunnel starts out with Miriam taking lodging in London where she works in a dental office. Interim continues, with the main change being that the lodging house has turned into a boarding house - now the inhabitants take their meals together. The stream of consciousness style continues with lots and lots of detail of everything that Miriam sees and feels. Miriam is enjoying her independence and solitude; she does engage with different groups of people throughout the book - her co-workers at the dental office, hanging out with two older single women, visiting an ill female acquaintance, going to concerts and lectures, chatting with her fellow boarders. It's interesting that she would really rather be alone and doesn't necessarily enjoy the change to a boarding house. I also thought it was interesting that she was regularly misunderstood by the men around her. And, although this is a stream of consciousness book, I'm little bit suspicious of Miriam as a narrator. I'm interested to see what happens next.½

[Revolving Lights] by [[Dorothy Richardson]]
The 7th novel in Richardson's [Pilgrimage] left me a little cold. I feel like I really should have started a character list at the beginning of reading this book. There were several characters who return after absences and I had a hard time putting them in context.

The main action is this book is a vacation to visit Miriam's boarding school friend, Alma. There she meets a man named Hypo and slowly grows closer to him. There are some great moments, including the group deciding to sleep under the stars, and some philosophical discussions, often about the differing roles of men and women. Miriam also continues with her writing, branching out from translating. And the ending was intriguing - a note from Hypo asking "when can I see you? Just to talk."

After writing this, I visited my trusted (only) source I've found for any sort of commentary on [Pilgrimage] and I found that Hypo is actually married to Alma and is H.G. Wells. So now I know!

Original publication date: 1923
Author’s nationality: British
Original language: English
Length: 163 pages
Rating: 3 stars
Format/Where I acquired the book: ebay VMC
Why I read this: year long project

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 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.

The first 3 chapters of Miriam's life which parallels the author's own life. Spend a lot of time with Miriam's thoughts this one is considered one of the first SOC books. I am not enamored with Miriam, I find her to be pretentious, judging and superficial.

Volume 1 (Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb): finished 17 Mar 2019.

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.

—————

This is a 13 part 2000 page semi-autobiographical novel told completely from the protagonist, Miriam's, point of view. Richardson is viewed as the first author (before Proust or Woolf) to attempt a stream of consciousness style. Her book didn't really catch as much attention as some think it should have considering the innovative style. One reason for that may have been that publishing a pro-German book in England 1915 just wasn't going to go over well.

Pointed Roofs introduces us to a young Miriam. She is seventeen and her family has fallen on hard times financially, so she decides to go to Germany as a governess to earn her keep. She ends up in a situation where she is living with a handful of other girls in a boardinghouse and she is responsible for teaching English. This mainly seems to consist of her listening to the German girls read in English and conversing with them in English. In between we hear Miriam's thoughts about living with so many women (not fun), wondering about her family back in England, cultural observations about Germany, and her lack of teaching skills.

I like Miriam. She seems to be the sort of person that is hard to get along with. She's sort of stand-offish and opinionated and not one to open up. But her voice and observations strike me as honest and authentic and I'm enjoying getting to know her.

Backwater is the second part of the 13 that make up her book, Pilgrimage. In this part, Miriam has come back to England after being a governess in a German school for young women. Now she is teaching in a school for younger girls, hired by the Misses Perne, two sisters. Miriam thinks about many topics that a teenage girl would - attraction to young men and feeling attractive to them, ideas about religion, reading novels late at night. She also finds out her mother needs surgery and their family can no longer afford the nice house they've been living in. So she needs to find a job that pays more than her current one. She resigns from her job and hopes to find a job as live-in governess to a wealthy family.

I liked this installment even more than the first. I'm getting used to Richardson's writing and finding a lot of insight and beauty in it. Looking forward to continuing on.

Honeycomb is the third volume in Richardson's Pilgrimage series. In this, Miriam attempts to make more money by being a governess in the wealthy home of the Corries. She is just responsible for the Corrie children and in her considerable free time, she reads, ponders life, and is introduced to the scandalous society of the Corries. She meets divorced couples and hears about Oscar Wilde and his trial for homosexuality. So her world seems both wider and smaller in this volume as she is introduced to a wider berth of society but is also confined to a country house.

I'm finding it interesting to think about her different teaching circumstances so far - in Germany as a companion to speak English with girls basically her age, in England at a boarding school with middle class girls, and now at an English estate with only one family of children. Her interactions with the outside world differs greatly in these three situations and of course the teaching itself is different as well.

In this novel, I felt like I lost Miriam's voice a little when she got so involved with thinking about the Corries and their friends. But then the last section completely turned that around. She goes home for the summer and two of her sisters marry and then she spends time at a seaside resort with her mother. In this section, Miriam's voice felt strong, authentic, and honest again to me.

I've now finished what is generally grouped as the first volume of this four volume/13 novel work. I'm very much enjoying it and I'm glad to have started this as my project for the year.

Deadlock :

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/men-are-from-mars/½

Deadlock is the sixth of thirteen novellas in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage series, which follows the life of an English woman at the turn of the 20th century. In the early chapters, Londoners are excited about seeing a comet which, presuming it is Halley's Comet, sets this novella in 1910. Miriam Henderson is still working as a sort of business manager in a dental surgery, and living in Mrs Bailey's boarding house. She is an established, independent woman and while not well off, has shed some of the financial worries that plagued her in earlier books. She has also developed strong opinions on social issues. When she discovers a book called Lovely Woman lying open in the dentist's office, she launches into a most enjoyable inner monolog:
Because women had corns, feminine beauty was a myth; because the world could do without Mrs Hemans's poetry, women should confine their attention to puddings and babies. The infernal complacent cheek of it. This was the kind of thing middle-class men read. Unable to criticize it, they thought it witty and unanswerable. That was the worst of it. Books of this sort were read without any one there to point thing out. It ought to be illegal to publish a book by a man without first giving it to a woman to annotate. But what was the answer to men who called women inferior because they had not invented or achieved in science or art? On whose authority had men decided that science and art were greater than anything else? The world could not go on until this question had been answered.

This was all well and good as long as Miriam kept these thoughts to herself; later in the novel her strong opinions get her into hot water, which further illustrates her point about women's place in society.

In Deadlock Miriam also finds companionship in Mr Shatov, a Russian boarder. Their relationship begins with Miriam teaching him the finer points of English, but progresses steadily to companionship based on intellectual give and take, and then to something more. There were long passages of philosophical discourse which I found hard to follow, not least because Richardson doesn't make clear which party is speaking and I tired of trying to keep up. But there were also moments of joy and sadness for Miriam that provided emotional depth that was lacking in previous books.

Interim, the fifth novella in Dorothy Richardson's semi-autobiographical work, Pilgrimage, revolves around Miriam Henderson’s residence in a London boarding house and her interactions with a number of new residents. Miriam initially keeps to herself, observing from a distance and continuing to take meals elsewhere on her own. But she is gradually drawn into the little community, first as a French tutor for the landlady’s daughter, and then through mealtime conversations, especially with a group of doctors training in London. She seems to appreciate the company of these well-educated men and holds her own with another gentleman who enjoys speaking with her in French.

Events are told not just from Miriam’s point of view, but as if you are in the midst of her very thoughts. Details that are already known to Miriam are often not explained to the reader, and the setting and timeframe are sometimes unclear. Every time I finish one of these books I’m not quite sure what to make of it, but I am interested enough in Miriam’s story to keep reading.

The Tunnel:

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/light-at-the-end/

Interim:

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/differing-standards/

The Tunnel is the fourth novella in Dorothy Richardson's semi-autobiographical work, Pilgrimage. Miriam Henderson is now in her early 20s and has left teaching behind for an administrative position in, of all places, a dental surgery. She manages appointments, keeps the books, and even performs duties that would fall to a trained dental hygienist today. My first reaction to these scenes was, "thank goodness for advances in dentistry during the 20th century!” And yet Miriam finds community in this setting, and greatly enjoys her new-found independence. She enjoys the company of women friends, and ventures into “adventuresome” new territory by learning to ride a bicycle. And wearing knickers!

This was a period of significant growth for Miriam, and many times I reveled in her happiness. But I also struggled more with the stream of consciousness style than in the earlier novellas. The reader is so deep inside Miriam’s head that external details are often not described. New characters appear on the scene with little introduction. We can infer she has feelings for a certain gentleman, and that the relationship ends, but there's little “story arc” associated with this -- just breadcrumbs left along the way. Likewise changes in setting receive little explanation. Miriam might be in London one moment and the countryside the next, but the narrative does not include the journey or her reason for taking it.

Towards the end of this book I found myself longing for more traditional narrative structure. I think it will work better for me to read the remaining novellas in small doses.

This is the third book in Pilgrimage, a set of 13 novellas published by Virago in 4 volumes, and telling the life story of Miriam Henderson. Miriam began her teaching career at 17, working in small boarding schools in Germany and England. In Honeycomb, she takes a position as governess for a wealthy family. She is warmly welcomed, and even invited to join certain social functions. She is not quite family, but not quite a servant either. The reader is privy to all Miriam’s thoughts, whether she is appreciating beauty in the garden, expressing self-doubt, or realizing that frequently her intellect outstrips that of her employer.

Meanwhile, two of Miriam’s sisters are engaged and as their wedding day draws near, Miriam contemplates her own future and the possibility of marriage freeing her from the need to support herself financially. But at the same time, her mother’s already fragile health worsens and Miriam must shoulder new responsibilities. What's next for her? On to the next book ...½