Harold H. Child, The Times Literary Supplement, 19 April 1923
Our pleasure comes in the permanence of Miriam’s nature and the fluidity of Miriam’s thought. She is still herself; still marvelling at life, adoring London, afraid of letting any person, idea, or desire come between her and her immediate perception. “I don’t want experience, not to be caught into the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvellous quiet sense of life at first hand.” That is the core of her, and it is a waste of time to ask whether such a character is not a very poor and selfish one. The girl is interesting, because from that dug-out of solitude she can send out her strange, peculiar thought; and Miss Richardson at least takes care that these thoughts shall be worth following for the individuality which they gain from that very seclusion. If Miriam keeps herself to herself, she has a self to keep to, and it is a self worth knowing. And Miriam’s care for her “life at first-hand” is justified anew by the quality of her perception. That is to say that Miss Richardson’s power and art of description compel one to accept Miriam as extraordinary in this regard.
The Daily Telegraph, 24 April 1923
Miss Dorothy M. Richardson once more presents Miriam as a sort of receiver for innumerable impressions. Naturally the mere outside story goes for little or nothing. What is significant is the flow of inner life that is ruthlessly tidied out by the heroine’s brain cells. Miriam despises other people’s inflexible sets of thoughts, but inevitably she herself forms no exception. Literature, music, religion, travel, the struggle of competinging civilisations — like an internal cinematograph Miriam’s brain registers the momentary flashes in their dying sequence. Reaction under such conditions is out of the question. Life, the world, even London itself, each is too overwhelming. But because this author has an intent and genuine mastery of her medium the novel is interesting, and one really seems to detect the main current of the mental stream of Europe through following the deviations of this single straw of thought.
And the novel is convincing in its exposition of a this new drama, which goes behind the silences of Maeterlinck and the cold rejections of Chekhov. Miriam herself faintly indicates the secret of her flair: “Well, it’s true what I’m trying to tell you. It’s one of the answers to the question about women and art. It’s all there. It doesn’t show, like men’s art. There’s no drama or publicity. There, d’you see? It’s hard and exacting; needing ‘the maximum of detachment and control.’ And people have to learn, or be taught, to see it.” Yes, it is worth while being taught to see it, but necessarily all the other characters in the novel slide from the reader’s mind exactly as they slide from Miriam’s. Even Michael Shatov, the Jew whom Miriam refuses to marry, ceases to exist the very moment that Miriam has stopped thinking of him. What is of more importance than Michael, or perhaps even than Miriam herself, is the deep, restless feminism of this novel. Some of it, incidentally, is as old as Eve and as modern as the Eve of Mr. Bernard Shaw. Some of it, too, reverts to Schopenhauer, though one imagines that Miriam would reject contemptuously the theory of any feminine fidelity even to the race. Be that as it may, Revolving Lights is one d, more proof of this author’s capacity to appeal to individual intelligence. One must add, in simple justice, that Miss Richardson has written a novel which ought to make Strinberg turn in his grave.
The Observer, 6 May 1923
When a “younger novelist has succeeded in Literature to the extent of founding a school of her own (may heaven forgive her some of her scholars’) she may well feel that her method has justified itself. For the sake of her originality and the undoubted stimulus she gave to jaded nerves, we all were very, patient with Miss Richardson’s clever hieroglyphic impressions. It pleased our vanity to think we could decipher them. “Here,” we said with satisfaction, “is an unmistakable horse; and that male figure in the distance — depend upon it, he is going to ride it.” Indeed, in those earlier davs, you could quite easily make out a horse or two — but now! To be quite so difficult as Miss Richardson is now, one must be very, very sure that the meanings so carefully hidden — or is it so carelessly left unnexpressed? — will be worth all the time and
eyesight spent on them when we discover them at fast, or think we do. As ever, we get an impression of a sort. The people, however, wholly unrelated to the scheme (if any), are living people. Miriam especially keeps her old vitality. But a key should be issued with the next volume or Miss Richardson’s public will go on strike. An income tax return will have no terrors for anyone who can answer six straightforward questions set on Revolving Lights — and each beginning, “What, in your opinion, does this sentence mean…?”
Virginia Woolf, “Romance and the Heart,” The Nation and Atheneum, 19 May 1923
There is no one word, such as romance or realism, to cover, even roughly, the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson. Their chief characteristic, if an intermittent student be qualified to speak, is one for which we still seek a name. She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. Other writers of the opposite sex have used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme. But there is a difference. Miss Richardson has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that it may descend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness. It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex. And therefore we feel that the trophies that Miss Richardson brings to the surface, however we may dispute their size, are undoubtedly genuine. Her discoveries are concerned with states of being and not with states of doing. Miriam is aware of “life itself”; of the atmosphere of the table rather than of the table; of the silence rather than of the sound. Therefore she adds an element to her perception of things which has not been noticed before, or, if noticed, has been guiltily suppressed. A man might fall dead at her feet (it is not likely), and Miriam might feel that a violet coloured ray of light was an important element in her consciousness of the tragedy. If she felt it, she would say it. Therefore, in reading Revolving Lights we are often made uncomfortable by feeling that the accent upon the emotions has shifted. What was emphatic is smoothed away. What was important to Maggie Tulliver no longer matters to Miriam Henderson. At first, we are ready to say that nothing is important to Miriam Henderson. That is the way we generally retaliate when an artist tells us that the heart is not, as we should like it to be, a stationary body, but a body which moves perpetually, and is thus always standing in a new relation to the emotions which arc the same. Chaucer, Donne, Dickens — each if you read him, shows this change of the heart. That is what Miss Richardson is doing on an infinitely smaller scale. Miriam Henderson is pointing to her heart and saying she feels a pain on her right, and not on her left. She points too didactically. Her pain, compared with Maggie Tulliver’s, is a very little pain. But, be that as it may, here we have both Miss [Romer] Wilson and Miss Richardson proving that the novel is not hung upon a nail and festooned with glory, but, on the contrary, walks the high road, alive and alert, and brushes shoulders with real men and women.
Frank Swinnerton, The Manchester Guardian, 1 June 1923
This is the seventh instalment of Miss Richardson’s apparently interminable book about her young friend Miriam. It is as full of queer little staggering perceptions as the eariler volumes, and as empty of vitality as any of them. Moreover, if one has missed its immediate predecessor it is as difficult to pick up the sense as it would be for an amateur to pick up his place in the conductor’s score of a symphony. From the mass of vauge notions in which Miriam seems to live the reader catches first at one and then at another, until it becomes evident that Miriam’s world is not a real world at all. It is not, that is, an imagined world, but the puzzling world of one who, being without imagination, is reduced to speculating about events and characters which have come within his sedentary experience. to meet men and women, and to react by theorising about them, is to betray a total lack of creative energy. And yet, with all that, Miss Richardson has her moments of wit and truth. She has an extraordinary gift of malicious description. Her book can be read for its electrifying sentences, some of which indicate real understanding. It cannot be read for its interest as a narrative or as a picture of life; but it demands to be read as being the work of a writer of unusual intellect, strangely blurting out truth and nonsense as one does who emerges from an anaesthetic. The feminism of Revolving Lights seems to us a little stronger than usual; Miss Richardson is not alone among our young women novelists in this respect. It is perverse and unacceptable, but it has sincerity and a sort of unearthly preposterousness which is very stimulating.
Country Life, 23 June 1923
It seems a very long time since Miss Richardson first introduced us to Miriam Henderson. Her story has run through some seven volumes now, and in this, the latest, she does not seem very much older than she did a book or two ago, or any more likely to share the common fate of heroine and live happily ever after. As a matter of fact, I feel sure that when (or if) Miriam does marry we shall certainly not see the last of her; but an event of such magnitude occurrin in her life will make the volume which chronicles it of outstanding interest. There is very little story in the present book, and as far as I can see, we take leave of her for the moment very much as we found her; but there is all the extraordinarily brilliant dissection of this girl’s mind which we have had in its predecessors, fewer dots, more obscurities, and some of those passsages of keenest psychological insight which have earned Miss Richardson’s deserved reputation.
