The following excerpt comes from Rebecca West’s 1957 book of criticism The Court and the Castle and comes after a discussion of Henry James in a chapter focusing on how different novelists treated the separations between public and private life.
… few selves are capable of giving themselves such undivided attention. This is not because their egotism is weak, but because their faculty of attention is insufficiently strong. In fact the mind seesaws between broodings on its special situation and surrender to whatever sights or sounds or odors address it through the senses; and we get a deliberate effort to give a faithful representation of that see-saw when we come to Dorothy Richardson, who can fairly claim to be the originator of the method:
The strange shock of the bedroom, the strange new thing springing out from it … the clear soft bright tones, the bright white light streaming through the clear muslin, the freshness of the walls … the flattened dumpy shapes of dark green bedroom crockery gleaming in a corner; the little green bowl standing in the middle of the white spread of the dressing table cover … wild violets with green leaves and tendrils put there by somebody with each leaf and blossom standing separate … touching your heart; joy, looking from the speaking pale mauve little flowers to the curved rim of the green bowl and away to the green crockery in the corner; again and again the fresh shock of the violets … the little cold change in the room after the books, strange fresh bindings and fascinating odd shapes and sizes, gave out their names … The White Boat—Praxiter—King Chance—Mrs. Prendergast’s Palings … the promise of them in their tilted wooden case by the bedside table from every part of the room, their unchanged names, the chill of the strange sentences inside—like a sort of code written for people who understood, written at something, clever raised voices in a cold world. In Mrs. Prendergast’s Palings there were cockney conversations spelt as they were spoken. None of the books were about ordinary people … three men, seamen, alone, getting swamped in a boat in shallow water in sight of land … a man and a girl he had no right to be with wandering on the sands, the cold wash and sob of the sea; her sudden cold salt tears; the warmth of her shuddering body. Praxiter beginning without telling you anything, about the thoughts of an irritating contemptuous superior man, talking at the expense of everybody. Nothing in any of them about anything one knew or felt; casting you off … giving a chill ache to the room. To sit … alone, reading in the white light, amongst the fresh colours—but not these books. To go downstairs was a sacrifice: coming back there would be the lighting of the copper candlestick, twisting beautifully up from its stout stem. What made it different to ordinary candlesticks? What? It was like … a gesture. (From The Tunnel, chapter 6).
It is obvious that if the gardener’s little white dog [a reference to something in a preceding excrept from Henry James] is not on the page it is only because it was not in Miriam’s bedroom. But a lot of other things were. This passage describes the state of being of an educated and gifted woman, still young, who is friendless and poor and follows the occupation, far below her talents, of a dentist’s receptionist; she has written to an old school friend reviving their acquaintance, and her friend has answered at once, telling her that she has married a well-known writer, and giving her a warm invitation to stay with them. When she arrives she is delighted at the welcome they give her and by the comfort and charm of their house, but at the same time she feels hostility to the world of intellectuals to which they belong, suspecting it of coldness and arrogance, and also fearing that she will not measure up to its standards, while at the same time she is honest enough to admire some of their achievements. The extreme skill of the presentation is to be admired: the tide flows, and changes channel as it flows, and changes back again, “I see this, I like it; I see that, I do not like it; I see this, I like it.” The presentation breaks down at one point, as writing is bound to break down if it tries too hard to do the work of painting: the reader is not clear about the promise given by Praxiter’s books in their tilted wooden case. This is a pitfall which has engulfed many of Dorothy Richardson’s imitators; but she herself failed in her later books for quite another reason. Miriam’s interior monologue went deeper and deeper, and in the end Dorothy Richardson would not interrupt it to record such external facts as the going out and coming in of other characters, with the result that it is never certain who is speaking to whom. But even then the personality of Miriam is not breached; and the series is still worth reading for the sake of the solidity of Miriam and such minor characters as Alma and Eleanor Dear, as well as for its stud-farm interest as the progenitor of hundreds of later novels. It has a further interest in the realistic portraits it paints of English intellectuals at the beginning of the century in the circle that gathers round Alma and Hypo, and in the confirmatory material it furnishes regarding the educated and lonely and dispossessed city-dwellers which Gissing had taken as his subject.