By far the oddest of all the editions of Pilgrimage is the one published in the U. S. by Popular Library as a mass market paperback in 1976.
One imagines that one look at these covers would have sent Dorothy Richardson into a fit of righteous fury. The blonde model featured on the four covers is not only not remotely similar in look or character to Miriam Henderson — like Richardson herself, short, brunette, near-sighted and using wearing pince-nez glasses — but the photography is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Vaseline-lensed style of Penthouse magazine. Those come-hither looks are almost the exact opposite of the Miriam who thought “Men ought to be horse-whipped.”
Although the books were described on their covers as “Dorothy M. Richardson’s Towering Novel of the Female Revolution” and name-tagged Doris Lessing and Rebecca West, their packaging would have made most unsuspecting browsers think that Pilgrimage was closer in spirit and content to the 1970s soft porn phenomenon Emmanuelle.
Anyone who bothered to read the finer print below this headline on the back covers would actually get a fairly objective description of Pilgrimage:
The magnificent novels that comprise Pilgrimage constitute one of the most enthralling and revealing [as in illuminating, not as in she takes her clothes off … a lot] fiction experiences of our time. Each novel is designed as a separate drama, but all form beautifully wrought links of a chain of being and becoming that lead its remarkable heroine, Miriam, through the major conflicts and decisions that have affected humanity, and most particularly women, in our century of crisis and change.
In this extraordinary work of art, Dorothy Richardson creates a style and projects a vision that give twentieth women both a voice and an identity. For this is woman’s fiction in the finest sense of the term — fiction that explores the many facets of modern life, whether sex or politics, friendship or art, though the eyes of a woman bent on changing the world as she changes herself. Long considered by leading critics one of the key achievements of modern literature, Pilgrimage at least reaches the American public in this four-volume edition.
The synopses of the thirteen chapter-books of Pilgrimage, however, are so cringingly misleading that they are here reprinted for their sheer car-wreck ghastliness.
- Pointed Roofs
- Filled with the intrigues and hidden passions of a German girl’s school, where young Englishwoman Miriam Henderson has come to teach, and where she must learn what it is to be a stranger and afraid in a world of new emotions and vulnerability…
- Backwater
- A school of life and love in London, where two different men each deman that Miriam be his, one symbolizing all that is safe and trusted, the other all that is foreign and forbidding, and both threatening to devour her with their ravenous desire…
- Honeycomb
- A world of women where Miriam seeks refuge, a world ruled by a dazzling beauty who presents all that is most outwardly successful and inwardly corrupt in the skillful playing of a woman’s role…
- The Tunnel
- In which Miriam enters the world of underground art and bohemian life-styles, and finds herself desperately entangled with a man she does not love but cannot bear to hurt, even when he begins to destroy her independence and pride…
- Interim
- An escape from the bondage of the flesh into the ecstacies of the spirit, and from self-centered solitude into passionate commitment and concern with the fate of humanity…
- Deadlock
- In which Miriam Henderson plunges into an affair with a man of an alien race, an alien faith, surrendering her body, and fearful of losing her identity itself when she discovers what marriage to her lover would mean…
- Revolving Lights
- A masterful evocation of trembling, dazzling awakening as Miriam realizes beyond a shadow of a doubt that she must survive as a woman alone, without the protection of men, and that it is her hands to do with her life what she will…
- The Trap
- A world of women who scorn men — an introverted world that welcomes Miriam with open arms, as she feels its seduction and its corruption…
- Oberland
- An idyll in Switzerland, an enchanted time when Miriam Henderson experiences life as it could be, before returning to life as it is…
- Dawn’s Left Hand
- Introducing Miriam to the joys and the agonies of a passionate love between two women, even as she is drawn into a degrading affair with a brilliant, self-centered married man…
- Clear Horizon
- In which pregnancy forces Miriam to choose between the man and the woman in her life, and between the two poles of desire within her…
- Dimple Hill
- A splendid English countryside estate, where Miriam seeks escape from the challenge of existence, but instead finds an ultimate confrontations with her destiny…
- March Moonlight
- The final, posthumous novel of this magnificent saga, both an ending and a beginning, as Miriam finds the person with who she will share her life and embarks upon the work that will give that life meaning…
Perhaps the folks at Popular Library were more at home with the work of Helen Van Slyke, whose novels, as the ad in the back of volume three assured us, was “Juicy Reading.”