Opinions about Oberland seem to have been evenly divided between those who appreciated what Richardson was attempting in Pilgrimage but were grateful for a change of scenery and those who had had their fill of Miriam regardless of where she happened to be.
- Edwin Muir, The Nation and Athenaeum, 19 November 1927
- Oberland is one of the best novels that Miss Richardson has written. The task she has set herself since the beginning — the imaginative externalization of her heroine’s states of mind — is not only difficult but continuously difficult, making perpetual and ever new demands on the writer’s imagination. The novelist who has a dramatic action to develop is lifted up and helped forward by the action itself, and every new problem, in becoming inevitable, becomes easier to attack. But in tracing the responses of her heroine to ordinary events Miss Richardson has to do without the aid of this impetus; and it is this, no doubt, that has made some of her previous novels, or rather some parts of them, appear laborious.
- There is no sign of labour in the present book, however ; all the difficulties are overcome, not only without sign of fatigue, but with brilliance and grace. Just where the effect which the author is striving to capture seems to be too subtle or evanescent for prose, she succeeds most emphatically, and her style only becomes loose and vague when there seems no necessity why it should. The descriptions of the mountains, the evocation of Miriam’s memories of Switzerland: these are perhaps the best things in the book ; they have an immediate and fresh beauty, a power of revelation which intensifies and deepens our vision.
- This part of the book is a legitimate and high achievement; the more dramatic part, the scenes describing the characters, speculating upon them, analyzing them, are not nearly so good, and, indeed, rather commonplace. Vereker, Eaden, Guerini, Mrs. Harcourt; these are figures taken nearly at their face value; conventional types, pleasant enough, but not real, like the mountains and the remembered places in Switzerland. It is perhaps easier to set aside conventional modes of approach in seizing the spirit of mountains than in seizing the spirit of human characters, who are subject to the same social inhibitions as ourselves. But to see nature as Miss Richardson sees it, to grasp the object and the mood in which it is seen, and to give them a single and living significance, is rare. The best passages in Oberland have more affinity with Wordsworth than with Jane Austen. In spite of its weakness in one respect, it is a triumph of this writer’s conscientious and beautiful art.
- The Bookman (UK), February 1928
- “A body projected in a straight line,” the definition tells us, “will continue in the same straight fine until a force be applied to change that direction.” Well, Miriam has continued in a straight line now through some nine volumes, and one almost feels justified in asking when her author is going to apply the necessary force to change that direction? True, in this new volume, Miriam is in Switzerland; but the change has no significance. Not that the topography, the habits and the idiosyncrasies of the Bernese Oberland are not described with a vivid eye and considerable subtlety. The fault is not in the author so much as in Miriam. She wants shaking. She seems incapable of any vital personal experience; she toys with people as she would with the crumbs of her breakfast-roll. If in nine volumes she has not yet succeeded in growing up, when will she? Or will she, like the old soldiers of a famous song — Miss Richardson will pardon the vulgarity of the allusion — just fade away?
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- The Morning Post, 4 February 1928
- We were going to speak of Oberland, the ninth book in the Miriam series, as an interlude. Miss Richardson’s heroine is here having a holiday in Switzerland, ten days or a fortnight snatched out of that strenuous existence of which so far eight volumes already record the emotional ferments. It might well be as a respite from these that she would find the fresh experience of the surroundings and company and sports of the hotel in the Alps.
- But for Miriam, there are no interludes in this sense. As the recipient of impressions she is unceasing and the impressions are all alike bitten deep. Hers is a passion for experiencing. Not life, but living, is the thing. Not for what it may lead to, but for what it actually brings, is the moment to be seized. Partly this intensity is conscious, but still more it is instinctive. Switzerland is for her a new scene, she tells herself, and she must not miss a color, a sound, a visitant in it, or a single possible reasction to them all, which it may hold for her — but do we not remember that it was even so with Miriam within the familiar range of St. Pancras’s bells?
- There, we recall, as now in the Swiss generla stores, the most trifling incident of the daily routine, like the purchase of a piece of soap, will fire some intensity of present feeling, blent with memories it evokes.
She glanced back at the biscuits. Petit-Beurre were after all foreign, and brought with them always the sight of Dinant and its rock coming into view, ending the squabble about the prounuciation of grenouille, as the Meuse steamer rounded the last bend. But catching sight above the biscuits of a box of English night lights, she chose a piece of soap at random, and fought, while she responded to the voluble chantings accompanying the packing of her parcel, with the nightmare vision of bedrooms never bathed in darkness, of people never getting away into the night, people insisting, even in rooms where brilliance can be switched on at will, at the perpetual presence of the teasing little glimmer; people who travel in groups and bring with them so much of their home surroundings that they destroy daily, piecemeal, the sense of being abroad.
- Out of her pages of such impressions on Miriam’s sleepless sensitiveness Miss Richardson brings Switzerland before our eyes — its spaces and tops, lite with fresh beauties in every changing moment, the skiing and skating, the native circumstance, and the alien figures like Mrs. Harcourt and Vereker, Eaden and Daphne, all alive with the vividness of her own personal apprehension of them. All trivial, some may say, since nothing, or seemingly nothing, comes of them, and leading nowhere in a story sense, even after nine volumes of them; but for others extraordinarily fascinating isolated with passionate perception thus. And got down, too, with a remarkable method of expression, perfected to follow with close suppleness every ridge and groove of the observed recording mind.
- The New York Times, 11 March 1928
- Many persons are familiar with that series of novels by Dorothy M. Richardson originally given the general title Pilgrimage. Many are familiar with this series; and those who are familiar with it have liked the individual volumes which have gone to make up the whole. It may be well to recall two or three of the titles, to recall, say, The Tunnel, Pointed Roofs and Backwater. The title of the newest addition is Oberland; and although, as stated, the several books form a series, Oberland is a unit in itself, it reaches back no tentacles to its predecessors, and the reader hitherto unacquainted with Miss Richardson’s work may take it up without fear at being ignorant of the others. Oberland, for general purposes of classification, is a novel; but there is complete absence of plot, almost complete absence of any well-defined story. At the same tune it is very near to being a wholly remarkable book.
- The principal character is Miriam Henderson. Oberland is, so to say, the autobiography of Miriam Henderson, and her spiritual rather than her physical autobiography. Action there Is, of course; but it is the action of one unsubstantial] mood, one adumbrated mental state, following on another that carries the reader along, not the action wrought by the narrative of successive episodes. As for the latter, Miriam journeys from Paris to the Oberland, Switzerland, remains there a short time and leaves for Paris again. That is all. And yet, since spiritual experience, not bodily changes from locale to locate, with such encounters as may be, are the reality of life. Oberland becomes the most realistic of novels.
- Oberland is a work of successive and unforgettable beauties; beauties of description, beauties of expression. The whole is like a Whistler drawing—distinct in its indistinctness. For one who has had experience of Switzerland, or, indeed, of any of the northern mountains in Winter, the book will be a perpetual joy, expressing what has been realizable experience, but experience which defied expression. If poetry be the expression of the inexpressible, then Oberland is poetry. One may open the pages) at random. Here is from such a random opening.
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Plunging into the roadside she turned in time to see a toboggan bearing upon it a boy prone, face foremost eagerly out-thrust, shoot down the slanting road, take the bend at an angle that just cleared the fence and dart a terrific pace down the slope towards the wilderness; followed by the girl with the ringing voice, lightly seated, her toboggan throwing her up as it bumped skimming from ridge to ridge down the uneven road. She took the bend smoothly with space to spare and flew on down the slope with the lifted chin and streaming hair. Both mad. Children of the reckless English who had discovered the Swiss Winter.
- Why is Miriam Henderson in the Swiss Oberland? One cannot exactly say—yet one knows. To such refinement has Miss Richardson carried her art that while she seems to tell nothing she tells all. But she addresses the mind of the reader less than she addresses his intuition; if he gives himself over to her art he becomes gradually aware, through what little is told, of a whole story lying behind. Forever is Miriam endeavoring to escape from herself; if she toboggans, if she skates at a furious pace over the ice, it is all endless endeavor at escape.
- For those who discover through Oberland an author not known before the book will be a find indeed. For those who have long been acquainted with the rare genius of the writer it will be another precious thing. It is scarcely possible to say enough in praise of a book of such rare, such quietly dazzling beauty.
- The Bookman (US), May 1928
- In Oberland, the ninth volume (not the tenth, as the jacket says) of her Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson’s heroine spends a few winter weeks in the Bernese Oberland before she returns to London and Hypo. Her experiences in the two volumes that precede this, together with the stimulus of the locale in this one, make her more actual and more vital than ever before.
- Consciously or unconsciously, Miss Richardson’s method has changed with her material. Far from being purely subjective, as in the early volumes of the series, it is frequently so objective as to be almost impressionistic. The note of ecstacy is grandly and triumphantly sounded, in contrast to the distressingly English guests at Miriam’s hotel. The book is rich in poetic passages that are a full reward got the gaslight drabness of the earlier books in the series.
- The Dial, May 1928
- In this, the tenth [an error by Knopf on the dust jacket] volume of Miriam Henderson’s Pilgrimage, we accompany her to a hotel in Switzerland and are there participant with her in a thousand sensitive insights. Miss Richardson is Victorian in sentiment and errs requently in style, but where else do we find so dedicated a reverence for the implications of each passing moment, so scrupulous an attention to every tap of experience sounding outside an ear always attuned for such messages?