The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs. Bryher (the pseudonym of Winifred Ellerman, novelist and heiress to a shipping fortune) was one of Richardson’s most faithful friends as well as a source of continuing financial support. She included the following lengthy remembrance in The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs:
“When I want to remember England, I think of your books.” This was, I believe, the beginning of the first letter that I wrote to Dorothy Richardson. I had learned in Paris that writer sometimes responded if apprentices wrote to them and her prose had been a part of my life for years. I knew the people in her pages, the girls in Pointed Roofs were like my companions at Queenwood; I was passionately interested in the Miss Pernes of this world, I had met families like the Corries and the Orlys, whereas characters in the novels of Virginia Woolf or Aldous Huxley, the two idols of the time, were in general unknown to me, or personal whom I should have disliked. It was Miriam’s determination to win independence at all costs that had gone straight to my heart, when I had first read Backwater and that I feel as strongly to-day, almost forty-five years afterwards. She and Colette have been among the few writers whom I have read with equal pleasure from youth to age. I added various rumours that I had heard about her to the letter: that she never went out at night, that she often opened a window to stare at the street outside, that a famous male novelist wrote the stories under her name. (All proved untrue.) I composed my page as carefully as if it were the first chapter of a novel and received, as reward, an invitation to tea. I think it must have been the summer of I923 because she spent the winters in Cornwall.
Dorothy and her husband, the artist Alan Odle, were then living in a small apartment in St. John’s Wood. It was a narrow, drowsy, still almost Victorian street where only the scarlet of a pillar box broke the grey of the pavement and the sky. Miriam (and she was Miriam) was just as I had expected to find her, with a stiff blouse and a mass of gold hair piled on the top of her head. It seemed inevitable that we should meet. A big table, sinking under the weight of Alan’s books and drawings, almost filled the room (I was told later that it had once cracked in two), and he sat behind it, smoking and smiling, always ready to rescue Dorothy or turn the conversation if it bothered her, and otherwise watching visitors or the way the light fell on the door, with his brown, draughtsman’s eyes. A fireplace almost filled the wall behind Dorothy’s chair. They had pinned a row of postcards along its top, mostly of gargoyles from Notre Dame, and faded as these had become through smoke and fog, they were so essential a part of the decoration that I have never forgotten them.
I felt no surprise. I wondered only if people who perceived things in a certain way met at a given moment those of a like experience. It was not that we agreed about many matters, I was a generation younger and differently sensitive to my age, but I felt an immense respect for the way that she had fought literally for our liberty. “Nobody has written as you have about London,” I began, remembering how her characters had been my friends when I had gone on dreary errands during the war.
Dorothy stopped that conversation at once. “So you have been in New York! I have relatives in America, did you like it there?”
“Yes, but, oddly enough, it seemed more old fashioned than here.”
“And are there some opportunities for seclusion?”
Seclusion was a point about which I did not agree with Miriam. I had been alone for seven years and I needed to be with people.
“It’s a little more difficult than in London but it’s possible.”
“Perhaps that is why the young Americans whom I meet so anchorless. As if no country nor thought could claim them. Restless, without hold of earth.”
That is why I like them, I longed to say, they are not strangled with traditions; but I knew my place, it was not for an apprentice to argue with his master and I wanted to know more about Dorothy herself.
“When is your next book coming out?” I asked.
“There are so many distractions,” Dorothy shrugged shoulders, “the cooking, shopping, letters….”
The characteristic sentence plunged me at once into that attic in Tansley Street that she had described so often. The stranger whom she had invited, not from curiosity but kindness, her hope that a postcard or a note might announce the postponement of the visit and leave her to her solitude with Alan, the certainty that one side of her was watching me as a representative of the young while the other was far away with her own thoughts, made me feel that I was in the book myself however much I might disagree with some of its philosophy. “You must hurry your publishers,” I urged “we are waiting so impatiently,” and she laughed, with indulgence but also, I think, some pleasure.
We were silent for a time. Only a rudimentary instinct that it were prolonged too far, departure would be necessary, impelled any of us to break it. I tried to tell her what Backwater had meant to me during the darkest days of the war, “I could grow again, I could grow . . .” and she told me the story of how her first book had been written. I often think of it now when writers complain to me about lack of security and time.
Dorothy had been loaned a cottage in Cornwall and had lived there on ten shillings a week while she wrote Pointed Roofs. The purchasing power of ten shillings then was equivalent perhaps three pounds to-day but it had to cover fuel, light, food and, as she particularly insisted, paper. She went without meals for two days to save the half crown that was necessary to post the manuscript to a publisher. She had hoped that it might help the mass of underpaid women workers whose life she had shared, she had no idea that she had invented “continuous association” and she was afraid that by being labelled as experimental she had driven away the audience she wanted. It was the deep drive under a bleak youth that had created the modern novel. I do not think that even in her old age she realised her achievement. The philosophical discussions in Pilgrimage seem old fashioned, but never Miriam nor her characters. We meet them in shops, trains and offices and they still use the same phrases. There is no better English social history of the years between 1890 and 1914 than in her books. Perhaps for this reason she has often a higher reputation on the Continent, and strong links with the new French school and writers like Robbe-Grillet and Butor, than in her native land. I think that the will be rediscovered once we dare to look again at our immediate past. Meantime she is “a writer’s writer” and I know of many artists who read through Pilgrimage, as I do, every few years.