This essay appeared under the title “She Was an Edwardian Camera” in the 12 August 1967 issue of Saturday Review as a review of the Dent/Knopf edition of Pilgrimage that included, for the first time, March Moonlight, as well as of Horace Gregory’s book Dorothy Richardson.
A forgotten novelist of our century, Dorothy Miller Richardson, has just been reprinted in the four massive volumes– 2,210 pages — of her riverlike novel Pilgrimage, a longer if less enduring pilgrim’s progress than Bunyan ever set on paper. At the same time Horace Gregory has written a perceptive biographical-critical essay—a portrait in miniature—of Miss Richardson, explaining the historical and artistic importance of the work which she brought out between 1915 and 1938 as twelve separate novels.
Occasion for the reprinting has been the discovery among Miss Richardson’s papers of a thirteenth installment, on which she worked for some years before her death in 1957. This has now been added to the fourth volume. The Pilgrimage can be said, at last, to be really complete. Mr. Gregory’s valuable appraisal stems in part from his own interest in the work and personality of Miss Richardson, whom he knew in London in the 1920s, and also from the posthumous papers, which shed light on this secretive novelist who concealed herself behind her heroine, Miriam Henderson. We are given, accordingly, a new opportunity to read a writer who was usually mentioned with Joyce, Proust, and Virginia Woolf in the century’s earlier years, and then became lost in the limbo of novelists who outlive their time and their contemporaries.
Miss Richardson started her work during the same years as Proust, Joyce, and Mrs. Woolf; like them, she was looking for new methods of fictional narrative, new forms in which to cast the flux of the modem consciousness. She was, however, less gifted than her coevals. They had the genius of poetry, she the burden of prose. Moreover, Joyce and Woolf were adventurers into the cosmos of myth and the symbolmaking unconscious, explorers of inner memory, while Miss
Richardson recorded with a certain insightful pedestrianism the joys of growing up as a Victorian, emerging as an Edwardian, smoking a first cigarette, and liberating herself from her middle-class environment. She had a large fund of egotism, a touch of megalomania and grandiosity, and a euphoria of persistence. From the perspective of half a century we can see that her contribution to fictional technique, to the evolution of “internal monologue,” was less important than the picture she left of a modern girl’s life in a London of ABC bakeshops, afternoon tea-trays, and the dowdy Bohemia of the time.
This did not prevent her from recording “intensities” of feeling, as Babette Deutsch long ago suggested. As Horace Gregory now points out, “the work is true to its title: it is a pilgrimage, a winding path toward the light, leading through stretches of beauty, bleakness, and gloom and ending in the glow of March moonlight.” Mr. Gregory feels that she invented a new kind of autobiographical novel; and there is no doubt that literary gossip will relish the life-size picture of H. G. Wells embodied in the character of “Hypo” Wilson, for Miss Richardson was one of Wells’s mistresses. Mr. Gregory, within the compass of his sketch, is concerned however with other matters; Miss Richardson’s artistry, her achievement, her limitations. The biographical facts will doubtless be put into proper perspective by the authorized life which Professor Gloria Gliken [later Gloria Fromme] of Brooklyn College is writing.
Miss Richardson’s artistry resided in her ability to use the visual, to make her heroine into a “camera-eye” before the era of cinema. We see objects and people as through a lens moving toward or away from Miriam, so that linear prose becomes a “panning” movement and some of her scenes a montage. All this has been assimilated in fiction and is now routine; it will come as a surprise to the new generation to discover how early Dorothy Richardson made her discoveries. In certain of her uses of “point of view” she recognized her debt to Henry James while in her world of feeling she claimed Goethe as master.
But it took her so long to write her series that she shows signs in the later sections of going to school to Joyce and Mrs. Woolf, although in some devices Mrs. Woolf herself owed a debt to Pilgrimage. Miss Richardson’s limitations reside in her prosiness, her self-absorption, and a kind of girlish conceit, an air of being a peregrinating judge of all mankind; and this smugness, while real enough as part of the Miriam-Dorothy character, may try the patience of some readers. In the preface which Miss Richardson wrote in 1938 for the assembled volumes of her novel, she drew a ribboned line across the critical path by claiming lor lier work “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.” The militant feminism of this declaration did not wholly conceal her own strong masculine streak. Pilgrimage has for too long been spoken of as a “wholly feminine” novel. It is as androgynous as any written by George Eliot or Mrs. Woolf, or even Charlotte Bronte, with whom Mr. Gregory imaginatively links her.
Like the celebrated Charlotte, Dorothy-Miriam began as a governess; like a Bernard Shaw heroine she defied family and went to Germany at seventeen to teach English in a finishing school. It is here that Pointed Roofs, the first of the series, begins. After that we follow Dorothy-Miriam as a teacher in a dreary London school (Backwater), as governess in a wealthy family (Honeycomb), as a dental assistant in the thick of the metropolis (The Tunnel), and onward through Fabianism, Quakerism, Emersonianism, the affair with Hypo-Wells, and finally the settling down to write her long book, with the prospect of marriage to an effete artist.
Dorothy Richardson was neither as revolutionary as Joyce, nor as disciplined and as brilliant as Virginia Woolf, she nevertheless demonstrated that the novel of sensibility could be cast in artistic form, and given artistic validity. Mr. Gregory sums this up when he suggests that she “contributed to the overthrow of fictional cliches.” This is credit enough in any century. It is good to know that a new generation of critics and readers can now give Dorothy Richardson that “second look” which the seriously committed writer always deserves after his life’s work is done.