From The New York Times Book Review, 27 August 1967
Dorothy Richardson and Miriam Henderson
PILGRIMAGE. By Dorothy M. Richardson. Introduction by Walter Allen. 4 volt. 2,110 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Boxed. $30.
DOROTHY RICHARDSON: An Adventure in Self-Discovery. By Horace Gregory. 114 pp. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wintton. $4.95.
The beginning and middle years of Victoria’s reign were marked in England by grotesque excesses of male control—social, political and familial. One student of the period has given, in recorded statistics, the number of benighted governesses (21,000 in 1851) and of ill-paid and sweated seamstresses who struggled at that time for some sort of livelihood. We also have the number in six figures—of the domestic servants who, in 1841, waited on the Victorian wives, whose husbands, quite generally, had forced them into an enervating idleness. Idleness had become, for the middle-class woman, a class badge; if you were the wife of a prosperous man, you did nothing. The demand of the Victorian male for innocence—and ignorance—in a wife left the Victorian woman untrained in the practical conduct of life. The “bustling Chaucerian housewife,” the Renaissance manageress of estates, had largely disappeared.
Giris and women, except in the rarest instances, took on the servile, flattering manners of the slave. Women became past mistresses of the cosseting gesture and the seductive wile. Their insanely hampering clothes made them into puppets. They were almost helpless under the law, trapped by father and husband. But soon they began to break into open, or half-concealed rebellion. Florence Nightingale raised nursing to an honorable profession. Miss Barrett ran away with Mr. Browning. “George Eliot” entered into a long, fruitful extra-marital relationship with George Lewes.
And they began to write. A very nearly complete documentation of the life and surroundings of the 19th-century Englishwoman has come down to us. From the mills of the Midlands to the parlors of the high bourgeoisie; from the Yorkshire moors to the governess’s shabby little realm, we have it all, written by women who were learning to cast brave and penetrating glances into their surroundings and into their own hearts.
Dorothy Richardson, in making her first break into the pupil-teacher and governess pattern at 17, was following the Brontë’s tradition. A season in Hanover, used in Pointed Roofs (1915), was followed by two later teaching stints in England, described in Backwater (1916) and Honeycomb (1917). She then, barely 21, moved into the beginning of a career that was to hold her for over a decade: she became a dental assistant for a group of Wimpole Street doctors, oddly combining the duties of nurse and secretary. At the beginning of The Tunnel (1919), the fourth “chapter” of her long prose work, Pilgrimage, we find her established in this post.
Merely to get at Dorothy Richardson’s novels—the 12 “chapters” of Pilgrimage, published separately between 1915 and 1938 and in a four-volume collected edition in England and America in the last- mentioned year—has, of late, become so difficult that the waning of her reputation may be partly put down to the absence of the books themselves and data on their author. Moreover, she gave the public, or the occasional inquiring journalist, little help. After her marriage in 1917 to Alan Odle, an artist and illustrator, she lived, evidently with the thought of her husband’s frail health in mind, principally in Cornwall, with a few months in London lodgings each year. This marriage, it is clear, was a sustaining one, which brought out, until Odle’s death in 1948, a latent maternal emotion of a particularly deep nature—an emotion which had appeared only fragmentarily in her account of Miriam Henderson (the persona she had assumed in the closely autobiographical account of her early years).
It now turns out that that account did not end with Dimple Hill (1938). A later manuscript, March Moonlight, was discovered after her death in 1957. The journey of “Miriam Henderson” from the point when she was “thrown out upon the world,” at 17, to the moment when, a woman in her thirties, she is about to be given, by a patron, a year of freedom in which to write, is now complete. But at the moment when she has found, after many false starts, her subject and method, Dorothy Richardson becomes so absorbed in recovering the experience of her young alter ego that she herself vanishes from sight
Early on, Richardson’s method was described by the novelist May Sinclair, in a phrase of William James, as “stream of consciousness.” Richardson herself, in later years, repudiated this label, and it is true that she did not hold to a single method after her first experiments. Impressionism in the novel was soon to be pushed to extraordinary limits; but Richardson owes nothing to either Joyce or Proust or to Virginia Woolf, who took over much but invented nothing. Two innovations are truly Richardson’s. She used Henry James’s viewpoint person, and she made that person— unchangeably—a woman: herself, at one remove. The character Miriam Henderson is the mirror in which all is reflected.
At first this reflection is exquisitely clear, with the senses of the female perceiver unblurred. Later, Miriam becomes more tendentious; the arguments multiply and the lines dividing pure creation and repetitive obsession begin to show. For there is no doubt that Richardson was obsessed, concerning what to her was the irreducible gap between the nature and motives of women and men. But there is also little doubt that her findings had truth in them; modem psychological insight has con-firmed many. And Miriam, as part of her gradual enlightenment, is finally able to recognize and acknowledge her deep and compulsive psychic scars.
Her variations on the man-woman theme are often extraordinary. It is evident that she has heard of the myths, as well as the historical facts, of matriarchy, and of the worship of the Great Mother; and, to her, it is with the bonds of a strong, secret sisterhood that all women are bound together. It is fascinating to watch her sensibilities operate in a region which, though at first glance seemingly frivolous, is undeniably women’s: the world of clothes. She has written a whole grammar, a whole history, of the costume of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; she builds up, little by little, what can only be called an elaborate mystique of dress. Not only the cut of garments but their differing fabrics are described, and she is often naively delighted with the details of what has come to seem the ugliest period of fashion known to Western man.
She often takes direct leaps from perception of character through dress’ to perception of character through height, weight, bone structure and tricks of carriage. She is merciless to “the common”; and it is almost always spiritual commonness that repels her. And commonness had, of course, its own undeniable sound. She can detect the nuances of this sound in three languages (French, German and English) with zones of patois in between. She can not only detect the smallest peculiarity of speech, but she can reproduce it in an almost ventriloquial manner. The reader will remember a minor character — come upon once, and never to reappear; Richardson is full of such characters — by the shape of a forehead, the manner of getting in and out of a chair, or a flattening of vowels.
All this is feminine. It is feminine “reality” she is after; and she soon finds that this reality can be most tellingly presented in a condensed, episodic form. She is not recounting it to us retrospectively; she is sharing it with us in a kind of continuous present Not this is the way it was, but this is the way it is. Irritation caused by this condensed, elliptical approach has been repeatedly expressed by masculine commentators. A gap between male and female sensibility then exists? Not an abyss, as Richardson came to believe, but certainly a temperamental disjunction from which irritation and misunderstanding can and do spring. But she receives high praise from men. J. C. Powys, in a long study of her work published in 1931, says of her: “She works with memory, and what must amaze most people is the apparently willful choice of unpicturesque, unpromising, unideal and in many instances actually unpleasant aspects of reality. Yet all these queer things … are treated by her with their ramifications and convolutions as if they were carefully selected ideal symbols of human life.” These “queer things” were the material circumstances of her youth, and she did not shirk any difficulty in outlining and projecting this portrait of a young woman living in an attic room on £1 a week. She is recording feminine heroism, as well as feminine insight and subjective perception.
Particularly subjective and feminine are the waves of euphoria that wash over her again and again. Sudden radiance will illumine some dull task; a London street — the line of its houses against the sky, its traffic, its people — will begin to open out into timelessness. As with all true mystics, her vision is based on the sharp apprehension of reality. Later in the work, it is true, the half-impression begins to replace the full delineation, and the hint and the veiled anecdote can become rather tiresome. She begins to bypass crises. That she evaded any direct description of her mother’s suicide, at the end of Honeycomb (1917), we now know; it is one of the facts put before us by Mr. Gregory’s meticulous biography.
At the same time, she does not scant descriptions of certain hysterias and neuroses of the transitional time she is dealing with — pathological states which were to disappear, or take on another coloring, in the post-1914 world. Here is the “born spinster,” the “born bachelor,” the pathological child, along with morbid jealousy and emotional tyranny in various disguised forms. It is freedom Miriam is out for, not power. She is fighting every step of the way, not only for social justice, but for the right, as a woman and a growing individual, to stand clear from the shams which had tortured her as a child; from her father’s double-dealing and her mother’s subservience and final despair.
Her diction, from the beginning, is fresh and alert. There is no “period” or deadening language; she places, often, epithet beside epithet in her effort accurately to give the true in- nemess of people and events. She possesses, Powys says, “a certain obstinate, humorous, massive, deliberate approach to life which is not in the least ashamed of being pedantic.” She is capable of slashing out at women; and she is never taken, in by the then-prevalent feminist ‘notion that men have been continuously, throughout history, out to conquer and enslave women. Women have a birthright, which they should claim, as beings whose knowledge of, and intuitions concerning reality are profound.
Politics and the vote touch the sur-face only. “These women’s rights people,” she says in Deadlock (1921), “are the worst of all. Because they think women have been subject in the past. Women have never been subject. Never can be. The proof of this is the way men have always been puzzled and everlastingly trying fresh theories; founded on the very small experience of women any man is capable of having…. [Men] must leave off imagining themselves as a race of gods fighting against chaos, and thinking of women as part of the chaos they have to civilize. There isn’t any ‘chaos’…. It’s the principle masculine delusion. It is not a truth to say that women must be civilized.”
Mr. Gregory’s well-organized and perceptive study is extremely valuable in setting the rather confused record straight He has had access to late correspondence between Richardson, her occasional patrons and her many friends; and at last the dates are put right (1873-1957)—for at the time of her marriage, the 44-year-old woman had fibbed, in a rather endearing female fashion, about her age. Mr. Gregory quotes brilliantly from Pilgrimage and rightly describes it as a rare example of a woman’s restless, yet profound, spiritual quest.
And in the beautifully printed, new complete edition, comprising, at last the entire 13 “chapters” of this remarkable and original prose chronicle of our time, we finally have Richardson through “Miriam” complete: the brave, if not entirely fearless (for she is often racked by fear) little wrong-headed-to-the-majority partisan of her own sex (and of living as experienced by her own sex), in her high-necked blouse and (before she took up cycling) long skirt, from which the dust and mud of the London streets must be brushed daily; working endless hours in poor light at a job which involved physical drudgery as well as endless tact; going home to a tiny room under the roof of a badly run boarding house; meeting, in spite of her handicapped position, an astonishing range of human beings and of points of view; going to lectures; keeping up her music and languages; listening to debates at the Fabian Society; daring to go into a restaurant late at night, driven by cold and exhaustion, to order a roll, butter and a cup of cocoa; trying to write, learning to write; tiying to love and yet remain free; vividly aware of life and London. And continually sensing transition, welcoming change, eager to bring on the future and be involved with “the new.” And reiterating (on the verge of the most terrible war in history, wherein all varieties of masculine madnesses were to be proven real): “Until it has been clearly explained that men are always partly wrong in their ideas, life [will] be full of poison and secret bitterness.”
Louise Bogan was the first woman appointed Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress (1945) and The New Yorker’s primary poetry critic for many years. She lived from 1897 to 1970.