Perhaps the best short introduction to Pilgrimage and its parallels with Dorothy Richardson’s life is the poet Horace Gregory’s 1967 book Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery. Gregory was deeply sympathetic with Richardson’s attitudes and artistic approach and he book is highly recommended for those looking for an overview to accompany a reading of the novel. Throughout his book, Gregory deliberately links the fictional and authorial selves by consistently referring to “Dorothy-Miriam.”
Here is what he had to say about the autobiographical links between Pointed Roofs and Richardson’s own experiences in Hanover.
Images of remembered sunny mornings weave their way through the first four sections of Pilgrimage and the journey toward Hanover is also in an easterly direction. Since Dorothy-Miriam was clearly in search of an education, the temptation is to read a great deal of symbolic meaning into the morning path her journey took. Some such meaning is, of course, implied, but for the moment it is best simply to acknowledge that the actual fabric of Dorothy Richardson’s life followed the same pattern as Dorothy-Miriam’s. The scenes are of life seen in retrospect: shifting, and sometimes fading in and out, yet always retaining their psychological veracity as well as their likeness to new techniques in realism. One should also be reminded of the existence of Villette in Dorothy-Miriam’s mind. It is remarkable how the beginnings of Pointed Roofs and Charlotte Bronte’s novel coincide. In both works the young heroines are almost as inexperienced as the pupils they are hired to teach, and as they approach their new assignments both girls become acutely aware of their lack of worldly knowledge. For the first hundred pages the general framework of the two books is the same. (But what Gerard Manley Hopkins would call “the inscape” of Pointed Roofs is, of course, very different from anything that Charlotte Bronte wrote.)
Dorothy-Miriam was not to be happy in Hanover at Fraulein Pfaff’s (Pabst’s) school; she was too close to the level of the inexperienced girls she had been hired to teach, too timid and dreamy to win their respect. She was quite the opposite of the sharp-eyed instructress she had been supposed to be; she was frighteningly near-sighted, lost in a mist without her shining pince-nez. (Her near-sightedness probably contributed to the quality of her broad brush-strokes in the more impressionistic passages of her prose, where detail is lost in bright splashes of color.) Fraulein Pfaff saw her as awkward and slow-witted, big-handed and clumsy. Dorothy-Miriam could not deny her unfitness for the school. Her happiest moments there were spent at the piano.
For Dorothy-Miriam teaching was to be an adventure, not a career. The adventure was to be part of her education if no one else’s. Meanwhile she was too unworldly for the tasks assigned to her by Fraulein Pfaff. Her solution of the problem was unheroic, yet not uncourageous — with her lessons in Germany scarcely more than halflearned, she turned and fled back to Putney, and to whatever remained of home. The flight was accomplished with dry eyes, without self-pity. It is this lack of self-pity that holds, however negative it may seem, our interest in her survival and the progress of her journey. Her return to Putney brings the first chapter of her adventures to the last pages of Pointed Roofs.