Dimple Hill appeared three years after Clear Horizon as the last chapter in what was considered the complete edition of Pilgrimage published jointly by Dent in the U.K. and Knopf in the U.S.. Its writing, however, took much longer, as Richardson began it in 1933 but then put it on hold while she undertook a number of translation jobs, including the German novelist Robert Neumann’s Mammon and the Swiss writer Robert de Traz’s account of life in a tuberculosis sanitorium, Silent Hours.
In October 1935, Richardson wrote her friend Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman McAlmon) that having finished her translation work, she intended to take 15 months to write what she referred to only as “xii.” Six months later, she wrote:
Trevone Cottage. Trevone. Padstow.
15 April 1936Dear Bryher,
At last, I can more or less answer your enquiry as to XII, and do so now because, in the event of your being able to come over, the subject might come up and I don’t, as things stand at the moment, wish to discuss it before Alan. Neither do I wish to appear uncommunicative.When you asked after the new volume, I was only just beginning to shake off the conviction of being, as a writer, finished and done with. From October to Christmas, inhabiting, successively, the most various hells, I produced, with infinite labour, entirely lifeless material. I found it impossible to get back, save in terms of trite, abstract propositions, either into M’s world or into her thoughts and feelings, and could only conclude that the years of translations — five exacting books in succession, and the translator with only a smattering of either French or German vocabulary — ending with my illness, had carried me too far away for a return. After Christmas, I burned my script and tried again, getting on a little better, though still hideously slowly, and still feeling far too much “outside”. This may be inevitable. I can’t tell. But I do find, here in lodgings with our needs supplied by someone else, a revival of the old interest and stimulus.
She was similarly pessimistic in writing John Cowper Powys that summer:
Begun three years ago and set aside for translations, it grew last autumn and stopped in December. Taking it up again in April, I have managed two or three hundred words on most days, but in regard to this last third my most friendly critics will ask what has happened to D. R….. What did happen is a kind of breakdown…. To me the last third, dragged word by painful word, is dead.
In November 1936, she was still at work, as she informed Powys:
As for me, after two years of I. R. [Richardson’s shorthand for “Imperfectly Realised”], of an infinite slowness & laboriousness, all scrapped, I now go more easily, though very slowly, & differently. A different focus, more aged, wider, less vital perhaps, or, if vital at all, differently. I cannot tell. Anyway the writing of a somewhat ponderously-moving stout old dame.
In mid-March 1937, she could report to Bryher:
Most of XII is done, & the whole I hope will be ready in time. But typing, which also means revision, is a lengthy business. Have you by the way heard of the Grosvenor Literary Service? They have a night shift & will type a novel in forty-eight hours. I dislike mass production, but, if my own type-script is much bescribbled, shall find them a blessing.
Finally, in July 1937, she wrote to Bryher that Dimple Hill was with Dents:
Being read. They now tell me, to my comfort, that they knew the worst in regard to my sales before they took me over. And still protest discouragement over sales of C.H. [Clear Horizon]. They press me to finish the book &, in the hope of having the whole in their hands before the beginning the uniform edition, are holding up the publication of the present volume. On one pretext & another. They talk now, declaring that it takes months to get page proofs through the ranks of the Book Society, of January publication in place of the previously agreed autumn date. I see their difficulties, arising from Kot’s [S. S. Koteliansky] assumption that the book, Pilgrimage, was finished. Nobody’s fault.