Book 8. The Trap: Contemporary Reviews

Arriving two years after Revolving Lights, The Trap provoked a number of its reviewers to react with a mix of frustration and exhaustion. While Richardson’s sensitive and impressionistic style was consistently praised, some, like Harold Child of the TLS felt there was no end in sight: “A thousand more books about her, and still there can be nothing new…”

Harold Hannyngton Child, Times Literary Supplement, 30 April 1925

In The Trap, Miss Dorothy Richardson tells us more about Miriam Henderson: this much more, at most — that she went to share rooms with Miss Holland. That may seem an inadequate amount of incident for more than 200 pages; but it might have been of capital importance. It might have been an occasion for some sort of growth or development or change in Miriam Henderson. It was not. Miriam Henderson in the new surroundings is exactly the same as she always was; and the story of her sharing rooms with Miss Holland might come anywhere in the longish series of books about her. It helps to show that Miriam does not change and cannot change, because she is wholly self-centred and self-contained. She alone consciously lives, and all the rest of the world and the people in it exist merely as they affect her sensibilities…. Hers is the idealist philosphy lived to its extreme limit. She is so much alone in consciousness that she does not know when she is speaking in the first person and when in the third, for there is only one person. And she lives so wholly in sensation that very often there is no suitable expression for what happens to her except the jottings and joltings of unrealted phrases. We continue to admire her sensitiveness to impressions and the agility of her power of association. But we feel that we know by now every possible pattern and combination which the light and colour of the world, falling upon the smooth, blank screen of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness, can offer to our eyes. A thousand more books about her, and still there can be nothing new, nothing even more or less than it was. For Miriam herself is nothing but the screen. And Miss Dorothy Richardson, who invented this method of story-telling, has already exhausted its possibilities.

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Manchester Guardian, 15 May 1925

“One gets rather sick and tired of her everlasting Miriam.” So wrote the late W. H. Hudson to Mr. Edward Garnett when first it became evident that Miss Richardson did not intend to let her heroine fade out of our sight. “At any rate,” he added, “I don’t want to see all of a person’s inside.” Some ten years have passed since poor Miriam Henderson was so emphatically snubbed by one who was a keen student of literature as well as of nature, and Miss Richardson is still writing about her, still exposing her “inside.” The Trap is the eighth novel with the same central character, and the reader who at the beginning admired the author’s originality of method in presenting her has already, prompted by Interim and Revolving Lights, especially, found himself wondering if the task of delineating this self-centred and isolated person has been worth it. The Trap will cause similar doubts in even those who are still reluctant to give judgment. Miriam has found rooms at Flaxman’s Court, in “a scrap of London standing apart, between teh Bloomsbury squares and the maze of streets towards the City.” She shares them with an elderly gentlewoman, Miss Holland. The arrangement is very promising, but alas! there are fleas in the beds, Miss Holland has her difficult moods, there are lodgers on the floor beneath who quarrel violently on Bank Holiday night, and the landlord and his mother are not particularly attractive. We get the suffestion that these are intended to be tremendous trifles, but they are not. None of them has significance. Nothing happens, nor is the coming together of Miriam and her temporary friend of significance in the general scheme of the novel sequence.

Miss Richardson spreads herself in a now well-known style, and we feel at the close that there is no reason whatever why Miriam should not be written about ad infinitum — already a ninth volume is announced. No one can wonder how the author manages to spin such a lengthy thread: the method is apparent at every turn of the page. “‘I am glad,’ she added quickly, in Miss Holland’s most stately manner, reflecting that a gracious aloofness was an excellent protection, ‘that ou find us pleasant neighbours.'” Stictly speaking, of course, it was just as unnecessary to break up the statement and put such a thick wedge of comment between the two parts of the speech as it was to describe what Miss Richardson does so often, the opening and shutting of doors. this, indeed, is one’s chief impression of the book — the opening and shutting of doors.

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Hamish Miles, The Saturday Review, 19 September 1925

And so, for the eighth time, Miriam Henderson trickles sandily through her predestined hour-glass. One more stage measured. One more pallid dawn suffuses the Euston Road. Grain by grain, Miriam has slipped through the upper
bubble to the lower. Turn over the contraption the other way up (the glass is clean and dry) and there, once again, patiently marking off a ninth furlong of time, the same sand will accomplish the same journey: one more novel will have been tacked on to Miss Richardson’s untiring sequence.

This exordium perhaps suggests a yawn. But “The Trap,” to those who have had the sustained curiosity to follow Miriam Henderson through her seven previous episodes, is certainly not wearisome in itself. The setting is characteristic in the extreme: Miss Richardson is a passionate regionalist in her fidelity to a rather dingy Bloomsbury. And the sense of character in the dialogue, especially in the thinnish lips of Miss Selina Holland, is so accurate that often it seems positively to become audible as one reads. No, it is not exactly tedium that closes in on one’s mind as the last page is turned, but a painfully growing suspicion that Miss Richardson has no definite knowledge of where she is leading us. And by now this is becoming a serious complaint. Eight times now we have been left in midair. A ninth stage, marked “Oberland,” is promised us. But nine, nineteen, ninety, what does it matter if we are left with nothing but a distant glimpse of the Waste Land?

So we may expect another volume without one more hint being given us of whither we are being led. And in the meanwhile, we may wonder whether Miss Richardson has not perhaps mistaken her admirable economy of expression for fineness of form, whether the spiritual borderline between the novel and the short story is not being tampered with, whether it is not a pity that Miss Richardson should be permanently astride of her one hobbyhorse of a
Miriam — are they utterly inseparable? But no doubt we shall open the ninth book, and read, and still be wondering.

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Country Life, 20 June 1925

I am not one of those people who object to being obliged to do a certain amount of work myself in reading a book, but I feel that Miss Dorothy Richardson is beginning to impose on my good nature. The Trap has, if anything, less action that either of the many books in which we have watched her herine, Miriam, grow to the mature age of twenty-eight, but I do not complain of that nore even of the odd fashin in which the young lady is “she” or “I” by turns without any apparent change of narrator. What I do complain of is that with all my willing work, my years of experience and my real admiration of the extraordinary power with which she makes us share, in certain, perhaps not very vital, feelings of her heroine, I am still occasionally quite unable to understand what she mean by such and such a sentence. “ANd here I sit — while from far away in the cold centre where he formulates his criticisms, facing cessation, he is coming back to make suitable remarks — equally stranded in a perfect equality of inoperativeness.” That is an example. Perhaps I am stupid, but it leaves me wishing that Miss Richardson would use her great gift to make more “suitable remarks” to my intelligence.

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Babette Deutsch, The New Republic, 28 October 1925

The Trap carries on the story of Miriam Henderson’s restricted, vista-ed pilgrimage. As in the preceding seven volumes, the novelist, whose personality continues to see inextricably bound up with her heroine’s, records, in her sensitive idiom, not the outer events of Miriam’s life, which are barely mentioned, but the movements of Miriam’s consciousness as it streams over the rahter narrow and not too rocky bed of her experience. Those who enjoy scrupulous accuracy in psychological detail will find here an adventure much keener than that of Ulysses, and spoil richer than the crude ore mined with such difficulty by our native explorers.