Dawn’s Left Hand came out four years after Oberland. All the major British newspapers and magazines reviewed it. As Norah Hoult wrote in The Bookman, by this point, there were “only two ways of regarding a book by Miss Dorothy Richardson: one is either an almost wholehearted admirer, or one asks disparagingly what it is all about.” And fortunately, for the most part, critics who counted themselves among the latter chose not to review it. Sadly, no American reviews appear below. Alfred A. Knopf had given up on Richardson and neither Dawn’s Left Hand nor Clear Horizon would be published in the U.S. until the four-volume, twelve chapter omnibus edition was jointly published by Dent and Knopf in 1938.
- J. D. Beresford, Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 1931
- In Dawn’s Left Hand, Miss Dorothy Richardson continues, with her tenth “chapter-volume” the pilgrimage of Miriam Henderson. To those who know the earlier volumes the present instalment will be unusually dear and direct, even in places objective; but it will present considerable difficulties for those who are not familiar with such characters as, more particularly, Hypo, Alma and Mr. Hancock. Of these the first mentioned is the most important. Miriam returning from Oberland, the scene of her last experiences, goes first to a Club, “Flaxman’s,” [a misreading by Beresford, as Flaxman’s Court is where Miram has shared a flat with Selina Holland] in London and then back to Mrs. Bailey’s, her old boarding house. By the way, she has discovered a new personality in Amabel, to whose sudden instinctive adoration she reacts profoundly; but putting asie other incidental values, we reach an experience hitherto unprecedented in Miriam’s career with her new relation to Hypo. Its effect appears to have been mainly a strengthening of her contention that there is some impassable bar against the understanding of a woman by a man. She elaborates this rather too dominant theme of hers with a newly added touch to her old prejudice. “Men want recognition of their work,” she writes, “to help them to believe in themselves. They want limelight and approval, even if they are only hanging a picture, crookedly, in order to bring tliem confirmation of the worth of what tliey do.” And the one interjected adverb reveals an irritation that has an air of spite. Miriam’s calm, indeed, is severely ruffled more than once in the course of this narrative; and it is, no doubt, as a consequence of these disturbances, and of the threat to her own integrity, that we find her writing with that objectiveness so rarely found in her earlier chapters. But it does, at least, give us a brilliant picture of the man of genius, with the grey-blue eyes, who has become her lover, a man “in the midst of truth . . . but not willing to attend to its intimations.” In fact, his distinctive mannerisms of thought, speech and gesture are presented with a vividness that may influence some of her readers to regret that Miss Richardson has never permitted herself an essay in more conventional methods. It must not be inferred, however, that the steady, profound realization of Miriam has wavered in this new volume. “There’s more space within than without,” she says, in an early conversation with Hypo; and if we see her here moving at times in that more restricted outer space, we know that this, too, is an essential experience of her pilgrimage.
- Francis Bickley, The Graphic, 14 November 1931
-
More Miriam: There are no blacks or whites, but only the subtlest gradations of colour, in the work of Miss Dorothy Richardson, the author of Dawn’s Left Hand. So subtle are they, indeed, that they are elusive to all but the attentive eye.
Miss Richardson’s place in literature is unique. Other writers have written trilogies and double trilogies, but no one else has followed through so many volumes, which constitute what is really a single and as yet unfinished novel, a single thread of personality. Miss Richardson has been compared with Proust, but we had met Miriam long before we had heard of Swann.
Perhaps in her later volumes there are some traces of the influence of the French master; perhaps the structure of her sentences owe something to Henry James; but her envisagement of what in Dawn’s Left Hand, the eleventh stage in Miriam’s pilgrimage, she calls “the importance of the individual deep sense of being” is entirely original.
- L. A. G. Strong, The Spectator, 14 November 1931
- One can imagine a certain robust type of reader, not by any means a Philistine, complaining that Dawn’s Left Hand was just another book about a rather solemn young woman who thought everything important so long as it happened to her; and telling the author that she wrote much better when she was relating objective happenings than when, on page 9, she constructed a sentence twenty-one lines long, just for the fun of it. At the same time, there is another sort of reader who, even if he had never heard of Miss Dorothy Richardson, would, a minute or so after opening the book, suddenly sit up very straight in his chair, and begin to read with close attention. He might not altogether like Miriam: her concentration upon her own feelings and perceptions might seem to him sometimes lacking in humour; but he would read on, slowly, carefully, not missing a word, aware of a strange experience : and when, her narrative ended, Miss Richardson was leaving him, he would rise with more than customary respect, thank her with more than customary fervour, and look long after her as she went down the road. Dawn’s Left Hand, like the other chronicles of Miriam, is a take-it or leave-it book. I am the second sort of reader, but I would not quarrel with the first.
- L. P. Hartley, The Sketch, 25 November 1931
-
Miss Dorothy Richardson does not set out to prove anything. She takes Miriam a further stage on her career; that is all. But perhaps the words “ stage ” and “ career ” are misleading when applied to Miriam, whose pilgrimage, as the titles of its halting places suggest, never gets her (to use a vulgarism) “any further.” Backwater, Honeycomb, The Tunnel, Interim, Deadlock, Revolving Lights — what are they but denials of progress? In Dawn’s Left Hand, to be sure, Miriam has returned from the Oberland, and the Oberland was an experience different in kind from the routine of Wimpole Street. But that fortnight’s visit, too, was a flash in the pan, if such a phrase can be applied to any experience that filters through the amazingly close mesh of Miriam’s consciousness. ” Life,” she remarks, ” does not use me.” Her friend Hypo reproaches her:
“It’s committing yourself you’re afraid of: you’ll miss things. And live to regret it.”
“How can one miss things? ”
“Mere existence isn’t life.”
“Why mere? Most people have too much life and too little realisation. Realisation takes time and solitude. They have neither.”
“You can’t go through life feeling your pulse.”That, of course, is what Miriam has been doing through this long series of profound, difficult, intricate novels — feeling her pulse and counting out its beats to the public. But now dawn’s left hand is in the sky, and a voice within the tavern (or what corresponds in her life to a tavern) cries to her to fill the cup while there is still time. Shall she lift her fingers from her pulse and grasp the proffered flagon?
As is to be expected, self-consciousness dies hard in Miriam. Though I cannot always follow the movements of her mind without fatigue, I have the greatest admiration and affection for her.
- Punch, 2 December 1931
- I wish I had had the pleasure of reading the whole of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage” series, of which Dawn’s Left Hand is the latest “Chapter-volume.” I might then have been able to give a clearer idea of Miriam; but I am not very sure about this, for I fancy it would in any case be as difficult to describe her as it is to tell the character of one’s most intimate friends to acquaintances. To me (I stress the pronoun, because I am writing in ignorance of the earlier books) she is a mysterious and elusive person, and yet the author has so quickened her that I never, from the first opening of the covers, felt that I was reading a book, but rather that I was an intruder in the presence of someone remote only by reason of her private affairs, intimate because of her awareness of life and her capacity for clarifying and sharing her thoughts about it. There are scarcely any events in the chapter, which is purely an adventure in thought. Miriam meets a few people, talks to a few people, remembers a few people and many places, but all her recollections are true and lovely, as, for instance, this: “It was strange to have no childhood memory of spring; nothing in memory but summer in full blaze, so that even the remembeered sight of anemones in woods and of cowslip balls tossed from sister to sister, crushed, giving out their small warm scent, were surrounded not by a spring scene but by summer in full bloom.” The book is one to read with thankfulness over and over again.
- Norah Hoult, The Bookman, December 1931
-
There are only two ways of regarding a book by Miss Dorothy Richardson: one is either an almost wholehearted admirer, or one asks disparagingly what it is all about. Some time has passed since the last chronicle of the inner life of that formidable being, Miriam Henderson, appeared, but now we welcome her again, not one whit changed. In Oberland we left her in Switzerland: we meet her on her way back to resume her old life in Wimpole Street, where she is secretary to a dentist. And between the first page and the last page the only outward events which we take hold of surely are the making of a new friendship — with a French girl, Amabel; and the taking of a lover, a lover, we gather, who is not completely satisfactory.
But one does not expect a story, or even a shaping of life, from Dorothy Richardson. What she gives us is a passionate appreciation of the quality of life as it passes. Miriam herself stresses her creator’s special gift when she says here: “Most people have too much life and too little realisation. Realisation takes time and solitude. They have neither.” And so once again we watch, fascinated or supremely bored, Miriam Henderson letting herself into a house “whose every staircase she knew and loved in each of its minutest difference from its fellows of shape and colour and texture and lighting, of everything that makes up the adventure of ascending and descending flights of stairs.” Once more the passing moment, vivid and richly coloured because reflected in a mind with a genius for receptivity, is garnered and held for us. The method, as I have said, is unchanged; there is the same occasionally super-refined and too rarefied atmosphere; there is the same somewhat tedious preoccupation with the difference between the male and the female consciousness. But this is a richer and fuller book than the disappointing Oberland, and will not be neglected by Miss Richardson’s admirers. On the other hand, it is not likely to make converts of the unconverted!
- H. C. Harwood, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 5 December 1931
-
Obscurity may proceed from too subtle thought, too delicate emotion, or it may be due like Miss Richardson’s, to bad arrangement. Dawn’s Left Hand is the tenth of a series of “chapter volumes” describing the inner life of one, Miriam; the first appeared sixteen years ago, the ninth four; and little here is quite intelligible without knowledge of what has previously been published. A band of enthusiasts may keep on their shelves or even in their memories the necessary clues to Dawn’s Left Hand. The ordinary reader cannot be expected to do so, even if he is old enough to remember the appearance of Pointed Roofs and the second battle of Ypres. Too much has happened, is happening. So Miss Richardson confines her public to a very small circle, while the complaint is made on her behalf that her ability is insufficiently recognized. She only is to blame. Her obscurity is not a challenge but a fault.
It was Miss Richardson’s peculiar merit that she struck out for herself while still very young along new lines. How deeply her aims and her style influence modern fiction is not easy to decide, because her originality has been obscured by the achievements of Proust and Mr. Joyce, of Mrs. Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. In 1915 her subjectivity, her sensibility and her disregard of invention were radical. They made the well-tailored novel look coarse. They promised to extend the scope of fiction. That is all over now. The crop then sown has been harvested. What remains to applaud in Miss Richardson’s work?
Well, what does not remain? The personality of Miriam is too sour to be attractive, nor are her relations with other people displayed to much effect. A Densley, a Hypo, an Amabel are given the stage for a few minutes, but their speech is affected, their gestures histrionic and the view comes from the back of an enormous theatre, distance reducing them to tiny marionettes. And while Miriam goes on talking about the way words are pronounced and the preposterous obtuseness of men she has not so far succeeded in enunciating any large ideas. The prose, flaccid and unrhythmic, sprawls across the ideas that she has conceived. No, Miss Richardson is not a stimulating writer. But she is uncompromising, if clumsy, in her pursuit of truth. The egocentric Miriam with her petty vanities, her solitude, her lack of savoir faire — of which lack, however, she is happily unconscious — her isms, her general depression is reflected, perhaps blurredly as in an old mirror, but « reflected; she is real. My trouble is that I do not like her well enough to enjoy the difficulties her author puts in the way of my understanding her. That admirable novelist, Mr. John Cowper Powys, who has composed a study of Miss Richardson’s work, evidently does, and refers to her “universally significant psychic biography,” to the alleged fact that people who read Miss Richardson “with anything ‘Pproaching a temperamental affinity find themselves bitten with an insatiable mania for her writing.” I quote his judgment with respect, but remain, convinced that if I had to choose between reading The Faery Queen and re-reading the ten volumes of the “Pilgrimage” series I should for amusement choose the former.
- Illustrated London News, 5 December 1931
- One could find no better foil for Miss Cherrell [a character in a Galsworthy novel reviewed before this] than Miriam, who has, perhaps, had more novels written about her than any other heroine in fiction. Age does not wither her—indeed, how could it? — for her life is a kind of hibernation, in which the mind keeps ceaseless watch while the springs of action are sealed in sleep. It is as though an infinitely intelligent and intellectual chrysalis commented continually upon its condition, dimly aware of ultimate transformation and emergence, but powerless to influence that remote event. When one of the characters remonstrates with Miriam for her passivity, she declares that “Certain outsiders, I don’t say I’m one of them, see all the game.” If she had boasted of being one of them, I don’t think we could have contradicted her. Miss Richardson’s unique talent, which it seems grudging not to call genius, reaches its habitual high level of expression in Dawn’s Left Hand.
