A Visit to Dorothy Richardson in 1924

The following, written by Edward Garnett, Dorothy Richardson’s first editor at Duckworth, appeared in The Yorkshire Post on Monday, 3 March 1924.

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A visit to Miss Dorothy Richardson (Mrs. Alan Odle) in her lodging off Marlborough Road, in London, confirms one’s belief in supremacy of mind over matter. She lives in an ancient terrace whose steps and stucco are eloquent of decaying glories of the Victorian age, and when she remarks that her “royalties” from her publisher provide her with no luxury but cigarettes this testifies that she has kept her spirit free and her genius untrammmelled. There is need for such testimony. Everybody knows that Miss Richardson’s work is the most feminine of all the “intellectuals’,” and the most intellectual of all the feminine work. So her popularity does not extend into barbarous hinterland of “the best seller.” You gaze around and your eyes fall on some of Mr. Odle’s spirited drawings, grotesque and macabre. There are no cosy corners, no parquet floors, no log fires, no literary Sibyl impressed by the weight of her own reputation, no fashionably-frocked Egeria anxious to view herself in the mirror of masculine admiration.

Miss Richardson gives you tea and a cigarette, and then talk falls straightway on mice and men. On mice because an army of these little pests has lately invaded No. 32 and gnawn the books and her husband’s slippers, while the house cat has looked on with shameless indifference. And on men because, glancing away from tho serious deeps of mouse traps and poison, you have turned to congratulate Miss Richardson on that splendid piece of portraiture, little Mr. Shatov in Deadlock. You instinctively single out this figure from the gallery of her masterly drawings of our weaker sex, for delineating that mild, agile, intellectual Russian Jew she has seized with extraordinary veracity the vital distinction between Continental and English culture. The true Continental loves ideas and respects art, the true Englishman does neither one nor the other, but tries to play the game. And Miriam in that Bloomsbury boarding-house, where French, Swedes, Germans, Russians, Americans, and Canadians rub shoulders beneath the wakeful eve of Mrs. Bailey, Miriam herself is a London doorway giving magically on to European scene. In Pointed Roofs how perfectly does this English girl, Miriam, coolly, femininely practical, show the drowning, dreamy depths of German sentimentalism. Pointed Roofs, with Fraulien Pfaff and Mademoiselle and Miriam Henderson contrasted, is in our English slang a “scream.”

But Miriam’s feat is greater than this. Her creator is first of woman writers to forge a completely feminine literary method, one fluid, expansive, vibrating, moving in many directions at once, like the feminine mind, with all the senses alert, a spontaneously intuitional method of seizing and depicting life based on feeling. Women have played up to men, hitherto, bv imitating the logical masculine construction in literature far too much.

You are speaking of Miriam, and then Miss Richardson pulls you up short with the lightest, most decisive touch of the snaffle.

“But I am not Miriam.”

You gaze at her, that decidedly feminine figure attired in gracious jumper, you gaze her steadfast grey eyes, at the fair coils of her hair, at her candid, clever brow, and truth flashes through your dense male mind. Yes. there is not one Miriam, but three Miriams enshrined in one Dorothy Richardson. You see it now. There is first her unique creation, the deliciously expansive Miriam bursting with her own wonderful thoughts about life, books, people, her friends, that dentist’s establishment, and all the seething London world around her; secondly, there is Miriam who sits smiling at you, denying her own identity; and thirdly, there is Miriam the Unknown, who could disclose herself even Calypso disclosed herself to her hero. But, not being a hero, you stammer that it seems cruel of Miss Richardson to dissociate hersolf from the heroine you have long admired. She smiles enigmatically, and replies:

“That wretched little Miriam had no deep emotions.*

You ponder this ruthless saying. And vou perceive that her creator Miriam has now become one of those hybrid tea roses, a beautiful flower, indeed, but alas! scentless. And you defend Miriam loyally, and Miss Richardson graciously recalls how you, publisher’s reader, were privileged to assist at the birth of her first book, and see it safely into the world. You bow your head at her words, and suddenly she switches the talk on to Swiss health resorts. She and her husband depart immediately for Switzerland. She is to indite for the English and American Press glowingly truthful sketches of the life where ski-runners congregate; and her husband, forsaking the satiric classics of the 18th century, is now to turn his pencil to avalanches, and Alpinists, and alpenstocks. And there is still the packing to do! You rise to depart, and you pass down that ancient creaking staircase, haunted by tho ghosts of Victorians dead long ago, you reflect how little did its builders foresee that the end of reign would culminate in the triumph of Miriam’s figure, and all that she stands for to-day in life and literature, and in politics to-morrow.