From Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, edited by Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1942.
DOROTHY RICHARDSON writes:
“There is but little to tell of me. My childhood and youth were passed, in secluded surroundings, in late Victorian England. Day-school linked me with ‘the world,’ upon which I was thrown when, in my seventeenth year, my home broke up. Some of my impressions of what is implied in the capacious term are set down in Pilgrimage, begun in 1913, and not yet complete.
“What do I think of the term ‘Stream of Consciousness,’ as applied, in England, to the work of several modern novelists [and especially to Miss Richardson’s own]? Just this: that amongst the company of useful labels devised to meet the exigencies of literary criticism it stands alone, isolated by its perfect imbecility. The transatlantic amendment, amendment, ‘Interior Monologue,’ though rather more inadequate than even a label has any need to be, at least carries a meaning.
“Literature is a product of the stable human consciousness, enriched by experience and capable of deliberate, concentrated contemplation. Do not the power and the charm of all hterature, from the machine-made product to the ‘work of art,’ reside in its ability to rouse and to concentrate the reader’s contemplative consciousness? “The process may go forward in the form of a conducted tour, the author leading, visible and audible, all the time. Or the material to be contemplated may be thrown on the screen, the author out of sight and hearing; present, if we seek him, only in the attitude towards reality, inevitably revealed: subtly by his accent, obviously by his use of adjective, epithet, and metaphor. But whatever be the means by which the reader’s collaboration is secured, a literary work, for reader and writer alike, remains essentially an adventure of the stable contemplative
human consciousness.
“I must add the fact of the survival and increase, in the writer, of wonder and of joy, many other strong emotions competing but never quite prevailing.”
Miss Richardson is married to Alan Odle, an artist and illustrator, and lives in London.
She is short and stocky, with abundant graying hair, near-sighted blue eyes, and a wide mouth full of quiet humor and sweetness.
Louis Untermeyer has called her “as plain and subtle as her own style . . . quiet but dominating . . . with rich sensibility, and comedy that is realistic and yet at the same time classical.”
She objects strenuously to the theory that her multi-volumed Pilgrimage, which is her life work (though she writes poems and articles, she has published only one other book) is “enormously long”: she says that is “a widespread illusion born of the length of time during which the separate volumes have been appearing. As a matter of fact, the whole, to date, is no longer than four English novels.”
Miriam Henderson, the central figure of Pilgrimage, is often identified with the author herself. All the twelve sections (to date) revolve around her inner experience. Joyce and Proust are the best known exponents of this method (Ford Madox Ford called Dorothy Richardson “the most abominably unknown contemporary writer”), but in Miss Richardson’s work reticence is substituted for candor; “every critical experience,” a critic noted, “occurs off-stage, between volumes; she reduces the stream of consciousness to a trickle.” Her books, said Constance M. Rourke, “seem, first of all notation, a series of flexibly impressionistic records. . . . Miss Richardson’s special gift lies in her power to make the mere flux of the concrete suggest so much.” Elizabeth Bowen, though deploring a static “lack of energy” in Pilgrimage, concluded: “Until Dorothy Richardson has been given her proper place, there will be a great gap in our sense of the growth of the English novel.”