From Dorothy Richardson: a Biography by Gloria Fromm. University of Illinois Press, 1977:
In private Dorothy looked through the work advertisements in the Times. She found one that seemed plausible and answered it without telling even Jessie [her sister] what she had done. The advertisement called for a pupil-teacher in a school in Prussian Hanover (now a part of northern Germany). Dorothy thought that, if she were expected to study as well as teach, her youth would act in her favor. She had reasoned cogently; she was offered the job. She mailed off her letter of acceptance at once. Only then did she make her announcement to the family. No one was pleased, least of all her father, but under the circumstances there was nothing anyone could say or do—as Dorothy had known. Having gotten her way, she set about preparing to leave her home and family. She was seventeen and a half, five feet four inches tall, and full-figured, with long, light, curled hair and very fair skin. She wanted, above everything, to direct her own life.
When Dorothy arrived in Hanover early in 1891, the city had not yet lost its medieval look. Though it was gradually being commercialized, there were still the curious brick buildings, the peaked, red-roofed houses, the projecting stories that had given such character and charm to the ancient town. Indeed, Dorothy promptly fell in love with this old Germany. She was probably unaware that the country surrounding Hanover—heath, mountain, and river, woods and valleys—was very much like the Berkshire of her earliest days. Even Hanover itself, with its ancient past everywhere in evidence, was like the old and many-layered Abingdon, with the remains of its Saxon abbey in its midst. Both, too, were river towns. Hanover (or Hanovere), situated on the Leine, was said to have been named for its high banks (hohen Ufer). Abingdon had grown up on the single bank of the river Ock. And curiously enough, as if the starting point of her life could have been either Abingdon or Hanover, twenty years later Dorothy would choose to begin her autobiographical novel with the German experience instead of the English.
Now, in 1891, she came to a school that stood on a quiet, tree-shaded street several minutes and turnings from both the railroad station and the center of town. The houses here on Meterstrasse were close together, narrow and high-windowed, with the quaint Hanoverian gabled roofs. No. 13 was the Lehrenstalt und Erziehungsanft [Gentle Teaching and Upbringing] run by Fraulein Lily Pabst, who had been engaged in the business of education for some years. Back in 1876 she had run a boardinghouse and school “fur Tochter hoh Stande [daughters of high standing],” in partnership with one of her two sisters. The following year Lily alone was directing an “institute’ in Meterstrasse, her sister another in Prinzenstrasse, and the third sister had a boardinghouse elsewhere. But during the few years before Lily Pabst hired Dorothy, she had been settled at No. 13 Meterstrasse, managing what she liked to refer to as her “frohlichen Bienenkorb [happy beehive]. ” Dorothy spent six months in Lily’s beehive, by no means certain that she was always one of the happy bees.
Supposedly Dorothy, in helping to finish the daughters of gentlemen, was being gently finished herself. But she found group life new and intimidating. Moreover, in her own family she had gotten used to having her own way. Lily Pabst seems to have been used to this, too, with the result that she and Dorothy clashed. Whether they clashed in the competitive—and erotic—way Dorothy would have it happen in Pointed Roofs is not known. The evidence indicates no more than a surprisingly short stay. Dorothy went home at the end of the summer, having achieved virtually nothing from a practical point of view. She never made it clear whether she left voluntarily, at Lily Pabst’s request, or by mutual agreement. In any case, it was clear, when Dorothy returned to Putney, that what she had achieved was independence.