Links

painting of Alan Odle and Dorothy Richardson, by Adrian Allinson, from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.
Painting of Alan Odle and Dorothy Richardson by Adrian Allinson, from the (From the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale).

 

Here are some useful links for learning more about Dorothy Richardson and Pilgrimage:

  • Dorothy Richardson Society (https://www.dorothyrichardson.org/)
    • Maintained by the Dorothy Richardson Society, this website has the most up-to-date bibliography of Richardson’s work, Richardson criticism and the material contained in the Richardson archives. Designed to be a resource for academics and research students, it contains: information about Richardson scholarship; introductory material about her life and work; news and events; and an electronic journal, published annually, devoted to Richardson studies. It also contains information about the projects for publishing Richardson.
  • Dorothy Richardson: An Online Exhibition (http://dorothyrichardsonexhibition.org/)
    • Dorothy Richardson’s letters are full of details about her daily life, her struggles with her work, her politics, and her prolific reading. They are a window into her friendships, her business strategies, and her day to day life, and together they constitute a remarkable biographical document.The Dorothy Richardson Editions Project will be publishing Richardson’s collected letters in three volumes with OUP (as well as seven volumes of her fiction) but transcriptions can’t show the physicality of a letter, the beauty of handwriting, or the idiosyncrasies of thought revealed by mistakes or haste.This exhibition aims to show you the letters as they were originally written, and invites you to enjoy the ‘thingness’ of a letter-as-object.
  • Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project page, from UK Research and Innovation (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FL004011%2F2#/tabOverview)
    • This project will redress the current imbalance in literary studies, which has meant that almost all the focus has supported scholarly editions of male authors. The planned Richardson editions will be informed by the most up-to-date standards of critical and textual editing. They will become the standard reading and research editions for scholars and the general reader, making a vital contribution to public awareness of Britain’s cultural heritage and of the contribution of women writers to modernism. In addition, the editions will make a vital contribution to textual scholarship in modernist studies. The edition of the Letters will contribute to our understanding of the importance of epistolary networks in the emergence of modernist cultural formations, identifying those who played facilitating roles in these networks, such as patrons, agents, publishers, and translators. The edition of ‘Pilgrimage’ will allow us to reconstruct Richardson’s writing process, contributing to genetic studies of modernist texts.The editions will be edited by a team of leading Richardson experts, who have worked together for years. They founded the Richardson Society in 2007, and have organised the biennial international Richardson conferences, and set up the online Richardson journal.
  • Kate Macdonald on Reading Pilgrimage
    • Kate read Pilgrimage in 2016 and wrote about the experience on her website.
      • “If you teach or study British twentieth-century literature Richardson is one of the very few women writing fiction from the very beginning of the experimentalist, modernist period. In 1918 May Sinclair used the term ‘stream of consciousness’ for the first time to describe the rush of interior monologue that forms a prose narrative, in a review of one of Richardson’s novels. Virginia Woolf was complimentary about Richardson’s project, which was to write the story of one young woman – Miriam Henderson – from the 1890s onwards, describing only the essential elements of her life: ‘life going on and on and on’. Another literary-critical point of importance about Pilgrimage and Richardson’s achievement is that she was the first woman to write a woman’s life which was wholly centred on being a woman, not on being a daughter or wife or some other feminine role appended to and subordinate to a man.”
  • NeglectedBooks on Reading Pilgrimage
    • Brad Bigelow also read Pilgrimage in 2016 as part of a two-year venture during which he exclusively read and wrote about books by women.
      • “I found it profoundly illuminating to spend so much time looking at the world through the eyes of a woman who dedicated herself so utterly to understanding her own thoughts, experiences, and emotions. I’ve been exclusively reading the works of women writers for the last year or so, but nothing else I’ve read in that time was so immersive and so forcefully different from a male perspective. And yet, though Richardson is at times almost strident in her feminism, in the end, I think what distinguishes Pilgrimage is its dedication to the importance of individual identity. I found its emphasis on making — and accepting the consequences of — one’s own choices very contemporary.”

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