Twenty years had passed between the publication of Pointed Roofs in 1915 and of Clear Horizon in 1935, and many of Richardson’s reviewers were of a new generation, a generation who were still schoolchildren when Pilgrimage first began to appear. And so, an unsurprising skepticism about her method and her significance can be seen in many of their comments. While Richardson might have had stalwart advocates who’d stuck with the series from the beginning — some of them mentioned in the reviews — her younger reviewers seemed for the most part disinclined to read back any further in Pilgrimage. And as with Dawn’s Left Hand, there were no American reviews because there was no American edition.
- Gerald Gould, The Observer, 20 October 1935
- And, since we are on the topic, here is probably the place to announce the arrival of a new volume by Miss Richardson. She is in any case a writer sufficiently distinguished and sufficiently restrained to make the appearance of a book by her what we in Fleet-street call “ a literary event ” — much as Artemus Ward called the arrival of his offspring “a reality,” and then, remembering that it was (or they were) twins, emended the phrase to “two realities.” But this is merely an announcement — not a review (unlike the novelists who do not know whether they are writing novels, I do know whether I am writing a review). In Miss Richardson’s case, again, there is a battalion of formidable names against me: Miss Rebecca West, Mr. Ronald Fraser, Mr. J. D. Beresford, and, carrying the heaviest guns of all, Mr. H. G. Wells, who says definitely: “No one has the measure of English fiction who does not know her work.” Well no one has the measure of English fiction anyway, so that is all right; but of course what Mr. Wells means is that nobody is qualified to write about English fiction who does not know her work. It may be so; I stand innocent, for more than once I have ploughed with sighs and tears through the infinitely unimportant and exaggerated moods of her endlessly trying heroine. But I have never noticed that Mr. Wells writes like her himself! Two things, however, stand to be said about her; she was in the field before Mr. James Joyce, who seems to have adapted some of her method in Ulysses; and this latest portion of her saga seems clearer, more simple, more normal, than her earlier ones.
- The Times, 22 October 1935
- This, the eleventh volume of Miss Richardson’s Pilgrimage books, carries the story of Miriam emotionally a stage further to the anticipation of a child and the rupturing, whether temporarily or permanently we do not yet know, of many of the relationships which have become familiar to readers of the earlier volumes. Miriam remains entirely herself, taking all facts as shadows of eternal truths, far less preoccupied with what happens than with what lies behind the happenings. Her gusto—Miss Richardson’s gusto—for intense appreciation of the quality of life; her magic-mirror mind which reflects things unseen, and faithfully gives them back to the reader, enriched—these almost assume flesh and blood. Miriam’s enthusiasms, humanity, and aloofness are more personally real than the people with whom she moves. In fact what happens to her is entirely unessential so long as she is there to analyse, to react, to respond. The scene at the concert (“the white-breasted beetles of the orchestra” is startlingly true) where Miriam tries to tell Michael, between movements of the music, what is happening to her, reveals the entire uselessness of words for a nature that is not gifted with a sense for them. Michael’s response, so deeply, so kindly meant, comes very near comedy, though Miss Richardson does not move a muscle of her face; and her statement, “fortunately, like most men, he had no ear for artificiality of tone” though entirely a woman’s remark, rouses an uncomfortable feeling that it might have truth in it.
- Angela Thirkell, Times Literary Supplement, 24 October 1935
- In an appreciation quoted on the dust jacket of Clear Horizon, Mr. Ronald Fraser says: “It takes quite a time to get used to her.” This, to one who has regrettably allowed an immense gap to occur between Pointed Roofs, the first, and this the eleventh of what we absolutely refuse to call Miss D. M. Richardson’s saga, appears lamentably, if a little too colloquially, true. The Dark Forest would seem a more apt title at a first reading, when delight in Miss Richardson’s perception, her fine shades, is held in abeyance by the unfulfilled desire, surely not unnatural, to find out what exactly is happening.
- Readers who have followed Miriam through her pilgrimage will have the key, and know whose child it was, why Hypo had that name, why Lionel Cholmley should be missed, what the Nursery and the Lycurgan were. But—and Miss Richardson, who deals so faithfully with what lies below externals, cannot find this very wrong—the new reader will find that her facts are not essential; the adventure is in her telling, and in her delicate exploration of fleeting sensations that have till now been wandering in search of an author. It is very tempting to make a paste-and-scissors review of such a book, to quote almost at random some of the dozens of phrases that freshly illuminate old thoughts or explain attitudes. Amabel of the laugh, assuming impishly “an expression perfectly conveying the brooding, provisional graciousness of the kind of Englishwoman who is always alert to ignore everything to which this graciousness does not apply.” Miriam’s walk to church—at what point of time or why are negligible matters—when, as the grey church drew near, bringing her walk to an end, she realized for the first time, with a shock of surprise and a desire to drive the thought away, how powerfully the future flows into the present, and how, on entering an experience, one is already beyond it, so that most occasions arc imperfect because no one is really within them save before and afterwards; and then only at the price of solitude.
- This may not be an original thought; Miss Richardson would probably not claim it as one; but one wonders who else would have added “the desire to drive the thought away,” an epitome of the human wish to cover up mental malaise, hoping, if not to lose it altogether, at least to make a cultured pearl from the grain of irritation. Take again the description of Nan hemming a sheet—and who Nan was or why she hemmed remain unguessed, but one attaches no importance to that. Read what the author has to say about the “becomingness of a mass of white needlework flowing downwards from crossed knees, above which the head of the sempstress, blessed by the light falling upon it from the window and reflected upwards from the white mass upon her knee to illuminate her face, is gracefully bent”; and you have a symphony in white painted as Whistler could have painted it.
- Sean O’Faolain, The Spectator, 1 November 1935
- It is, perhaps, and yet who knows (if one may drop into the melancholy and elliptical style of George Moore), an unwise thing for a reviewer to confess that he is not familiar with the writings of a well-known artist. He has at least the pale consolation of not falling within the cynical epigram of the French critic who said of another French critic—Il sail tout, at il ne sail que cela [He knows everything, and he only knows that]. And he may console himself that he brings freshness.to his reading. I have not. to come to the point, read before anything of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s, and since she has been fecund and a few pages suffice to show that she is a sincere and serious artist, I am troubled by reading, after that first glance, Mr. H. G. Wells’ praise of her on the jacket of this new chapter-volume in her Miriam series: “No one has the measure of English fiction who does not know her work”; and M. Abel Chevalley’s “. . . parait alter le plus loin vers une renovation totale du roman anglaise” [“… seems to the furthest toward a total rework of the English novel”]. With excitement one begins to read; and in doubt one continues. Where, one asks, has one seen all this before?
- Where has one smelt the sweet odour of this narcotic before?
- Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa are more masculine, but they are of the same breath, the same deciduous style shedding its etiolated leaves of meaning at regular faint-falling intervals—- and meaning much more in Moore than it ever means in Miss Richardson. “You are not in love with me, but with memory,” Evelyn said to Owen, and so Life and “Reality” might say to Miss Richardson, of say at least “in love with your own consciousness.”
- There can be no question of a renovation totale du roman anglais.” Moore rejected in the final selection for his canon this hyper-consciousness of existence, which is like the dopey eyes of the Buddha contemplating his own navel, and Joyce rejected it by going on to the hard objectivity of Ulysses from the drug of A Portrait, and Valery, the high priest of consciousness, reduced it to a logical absurdity by pointing out that the more the mind attempts to revel in its own superfluity of experiences the more it empties itself of all externality and ends by becoming a force destitute of an object. It ceases to be human. That is not to say that Miss Richardson does not use a delicate and sensitive style, and see her passing pageant with a subtle eye for its many varieties of tone. Perhaps, as usual, it is all a matter of taste, and this reviewer is simply out of sympathy with the dim and distant seclusion of this kind of self-communion.
- Manchester Guardian, 29 November 1935
- Clear Horizon, eleventh in a series of autobiographical studies, will need no commendation for readers already familiar with the preceding ten. But a new-comer feels somewhat as if he had fallen upon an intimate letter or batch of letters from an unknown correspondent. The quiet narrative proceeds by a collocation of a number of disconnected scenes, in each of which the assumption is made that he knows most of what is going to be said before he hears it. Of course- a modem reader must be flattered into a belief in his own sophistication, but-why he must expect to know what a writer has not told him is hard to understand. Once her method or mannerism is discounted or set aside, Miss Richardson reveals herself as a writer of delicacy and charm. All the same, if there was to be so much wandering, there. ought to be more vividness. Miriam visits a doctor, a prison, a concert-hall; her reflections and observations are reasonable and reasonably interesting; if you have learned to love her they are absorbing, perhaps. But the texture of Clear Horizon leaves one dubious about the duty, of loving her, at the expense of reading those ten other books.
- R. Millar, The English Review, December 1935
- What can be said of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s Clear Horizon I really do not know, except that it is the eleventh or the nineteenth (I’ve forgotten which) of her microscopic examinations. After eleven (or nineteen) analyses of the personality and reactions of Miriam we still know less about her than about Beatrix Esmond or Manon Lescaut. And what is more significant, we do not care.
- Cyril Connolly, Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1935
- Clear Horizon is another of the “Miriam” books. Miss Richardson is considered by many to be the originator of the “interior monologue” or “stream of consciousness ” novel in English, a kind that was made familiar by Mrs. Dalloway of Virginia Woolf. She is highly praised by many writers who rank her with Proust and Jovce.
- I think that, like many who innovate, she has been outstripped by her imitators, and that most people will find Clear Horizon rather dull, although it recalls sympathetically the remote epoch of the suffragettes. “A syllable too many,’’ writes Miss Richardson, “or a syllable too few brings discomfort, affording one to make an alteration, even if the words ahead written are satisfactory. Perhaps everyone has a definite thought-rhythm and speech-rhythm, which cannot be violated without producing self-consciousness and discomfort.” But it is just this sameness of rhythm, often induced by padding, that lends a rather soporific much-ado-about-nothing flavour to the book. We may all have our individual thought rhythms, but they may be nothing more than bad habits.
With a single up-swinging movement, she was clear of earth and hanging, suspended and motionless, high in the sky, looking away to the right, into a far off pearly-blue distance, that held her eyes, seeming to be in motion within itself; an intense crystalline vibration that seemed to be aware, of being .enchantedly observed; and even to be amused and saying, ‘Yes, this is my reality.’ She was moving, or the sky about her was moving, Masses of pinnacled clouds rose between her and the clear distance and, just as she felt herself sinking, her spirit seemed to be up amongst their high rejoicing summits. And then the little manageress was setting down the coffee upon the near table, her head turned, while still her fingers held the rim of the saucer, in the direction of her new destination, towards which her kind tired eyes were sending their quizzical smile.
Joy that up there seemed everywhere, pulsed now, confined, within her, holding away thoughts, holding away everything but itself.
“I’ve been up amongst the rejoicing cloud-tops,” she wrote, and sat back and sipped her coffee.
The silence of the night grew more intense, there were millions of stars, small and great, and the moon now shone amidst them alone, ‘ of different birth,’ divided from them for ever as he was divided from this woman, whoso arm touched his as they walked through the darkness, divided forever, unable to communicate his soul to hers. Did she understand what he was feeling—the mystery of their lives written in the stars, sung by the nightingale, and breathed by the flowers? Did she understand? Had the convent rule left her sufficient sensibility to understand such simple human truths?
‘How sweetly the tobacco plant smells,’ she said. [from Sister Teresa by George Moore (1909)]