One of the truest indicators of the neglect of Pilgrimage as a modern classic is the short and disappointing catalogue of the editions in which it’s been published. The following, from the Oxford Edition of the Works of Dorothy Richardson, Volume IV (Pointed Roofs and Backwater), is reprinted courtesy of Prof. Scott McCracken, its editor.
Individual volumes
The first ten chapter-volumes of Pilgrimage were all published in Britain by Duckworth and Company. Gerald Duckworth was Virginia Woolf’s half-brother and the firm played a significant role in the history of twentieth-century English literature, publishing works by Woolf, John Glasworthy, and D. H. Lawrence. Richardson was never really happy with the firm, but Duckworth continued to support her work for little or no return until 1931. Pointed Roofs was published in 1915 and Backwater came out the following year. A second impression of Pointed Roofs was published in 1921. Backwater went through a second impression in 1916, and a third in 1930. The first American editions were published in 1916 and 1917 by Alfred A. Knopf, using the same sheets as the British first editions.
Knopf’s editions differed from Duckworth’s in that they always presented the volumes as part of a longer work. The title page of the first Duckworth edition of Pointed Roofs has Pilgrimage as a subtitle and the first chapter begins:
PILGRIMAGE
PART I. POINTED ROOFS
However, the reference to Pilgrimage was dropped in the second impression because of a copyright issue with the title and does not appear in the subsequent Duckworth editions, to the detriment, Richardson felt, of the reader’s experience. The first edition of Backwater appears to be a discrete volume. The title page simply announces ‘by Dorothy M. Richardson, Author of Pointed Roofs’. The only indication that the volume is part of a series comes at the end:
Note. — A further installment of this book is in preparation.
The later Duckworth editions did, however, include a list of the volumes in the series. All the volumes up until Oberland, with the exception of Revolving Lights, promised the next volume ‘in preparation’, or ‘to follow shortly’. In the United States, however, the single-volume Knopf editions put Pilgrimage on the title page. However, the Cresset Press Clear Horizon is the only edition to use Richardson’s preferred term ‘chapter-volume’ to describe the previous installments in the series. These inconsistencies were probably symptomatic of the tension between the status of each chapter-volume as a work in its own right and its relationship to the series. Duckworth may well have wanted to boost sales by downplaying the idea that it was necessary to read the whole series.
The six years after the publication of Pointed Roofs were the most intensively productive of Richardson’s life, with chapter-volumes appearing on average at twelve-monthly intervals: Honeycomb appeared in 1916 and The Tunnel in 1919. In 1919, Knopf published new editions of Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb, and The Tunnel, but the text followed the British first editions, reproducing the English spelling. The most significant change was the addition of May Sinclair’s essay from the Egoist as an introduction to the Knopf 1919 edition of Pointed Roofs. There are minor, but not significant differences between the British first editions and the American in 1919 editions. Overlapping with the ongoing publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, Interim was serialised in the Little Review between June 1919 and June 1920, with the book appearing in late 1919; Deadlock came out in 1921. Knopf published a new edition of Interim in 1920 and a new edition of Deadlock in 1921.
After 1921 the pace of production slowed to a volume every two years. Revolving Lights was published in 1923, The Trap in 1925, with an extract published the same year as ‘Work in Progress’ in an anthology of contemporary writers edited by John McAlmon. An extract from Oberland was published in the magazine Outlook in 1926, but Duckworth postponed publication until 1927 because of poor sales. From then on Duckworth only agreed to publish further chapter-volumes on condition that Richardson received reduced royalties. Richardson had hoped Oberland would appeal to the winter sports market, but once again she overestimated her readership. In response to poor sales, Knopf reverted to importing the sheets for Revolving Lights, The Trap, and Oberland.
From 1927, new volumes only appeared every four years. Yet Richardson, despite moments of despair, was still committed to continuing the experiment. The next chapter-volume, Dawn’s Left Hand (1931), took the longest to write and Richardson ended the decade that had begun so promisingly feeling that Pilgrimage‘s attentuated publication had deterred her audience. The publisher’s presentation of the volumes as a ‘series’ rather than one work had confused readers, many of whom had not read the previous chapters. Reviewers of the later chapter-volumes did not appreciate the structure as a whole, but saw instead a succession of similar episodes, lacking in development.
Knopf abandoned the project for the time being and there were no North American editions of Dawn’s Left Hand, or Clear Horizon, though the bookseller, Peter Smith, imported copies of the Duckworth editions, including them in his catalogue.
Collected editions
Nonetheless, by the early the early thirties Richardson was hopeful that she might renew her audience with a collected edition. In 1933 her friend, S. S. Koteliansky, took up the cause. Koteliansky was a key figure in modernist literary networks, a prominent translator, and a friend of, among many others, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. He first persuaded Richardson to change publisher, so that Clear Horizon was published by J. M. Dent’s Cresset Press in 1935…. Then Koteliansky put his energies into persuading Dent to produce a collected edition, including a new chapter-volume, Dimple Hill, the last instalment to be published in Richardson’s lifetime. This edition was published in 1938…. At the request of Dent, Richardson also contributed a short Foreword.
For the Dent edition, Richardson revised the earlier chapter-volumes to create a more consistent, less experimental, text…. Knopf published an identical four-volume edition in the United States.
Richardson had never considered Dimple Hill to be the last instalment of Pilgrimage and was not happy when it was presented as such. Now sixty-five, she continued work on the next chapter-volume March Moonlight, parts of which were published in the little magazine Life and Letters as ‘Work in Progress’ in the April, May, and November editions of 1946. Her letters suggest that she continued to add to the manuscript up until December 1952. The typescript of March Moonlight was preserved by her executor, her sister-in-law, Rose Odle, but it was almost by chance that its existence was made known in time for a version to be incorporated into a posthumous edition, published jointly in Britain and the United States by Dent and Knopt in 1967. Apart from the addition of March Moonlight and a new introduction by Walter Allen, this edition was identical to the 1938 edition.
A paperback edition was published by Virago in 1979, using the same sheets as the 1967 Dent edition, with a new introduction by Gillian Hanscombe replacing that of Walter Allen.
A cheap American paperback edition was published by The Popular Library in 1976, which also used the 1967 sheets. By the early 2000s the Popular Library edition was out of print and the Virago edition was officially print on demand, but difficult to get hold of.
Edited Editions
Broadview published new annotated editions of Pointed Roofs and The Tunnel for the North American market in 2014, edited by Stephen Ross and Tara Thomson. The Broadview editions follow the 1938 text and contain introduction by Stephen Ross and contextual texts and information about Pilgrimage.
[The first volume of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Dorothy Richardson, Volume IV, containing annotated texts of Pointed Roofs and Backwater were published by the Oxford University Press in 2021. — Editor]