Contemporary Reviews
- The Observer, 3 October 1915:
- This almost startlingly original little book deserves’ all that Mr. J.D. Beresford says of it in his understanding introduction. It is much to say of any novel that it has about it “a peculiar difference which is, perhaps, the mark of a new form in fiction,” but that difference, though indefinable, is here. In spite of the flinging on the canvas of what may seem a mass of uncoordinated impressions, the effect is not that of “the bunch of flowers to hide bad modelling of the base of the neck” that Kipling accuses budding artists of perpetrating. The book somehow reads as if the reader did not exist. No allusion is explained or incoherence apologised for; and, indeed, the whole is clear with a clarity as keen as the gables of the charming “pointed roofs.” Seldom have the seething impulses of a girl, constrained within an English mental corset, but expanding to meet and greet each beauty she encounters in a new and wondrous land, been so magically treated. It is a novel that no sensitive reader will forget. Its charm cannot be communicated. Miss Richardson may not be either romantic or a realist: that she is not that blue rose, a true genius, we should hesitate to say. Perhaps it is too early to decide.
- The Saturday Review, 17 October 1915:
- Doubtless the author of Pilgrimage caters for her own public, for one that will acclaim her labours in the cause of fictional pathology. The book is a charted dissection of an unsound mind. It lays bare the workings of a sick imagination in a girl of 17 years. There is no plot, no love motive. Every interest is made subservient to the pathological. In the German school in which the scenes pass the Principal and the girls are viewed only through the medium of Miriam’s atrabilious eyes. The picture is filled with faint emanations of her own mental disorder.
- Sometimes, in scanning the catalogue of her external and mental impression, we recall the constitution of Marie Bashkirtseff — the youthful Russian neuropath of the late ’eighties — who wrote in her Journal: “I am neither woman, daughter, nor friend I Everything finally resolves itself into a subject for observation, reflection, and analysis. A look, a voice, a joy, a pain, are immediately weighed, examined, noted, and classified, and when I have noted it down I am content.” There is, indeed, the same intensely impressionable nature in Miriam, the same egoistic consciousness and self-absorption; but the coldly critical mind towards God and kith and kind in Miss Richardson’s misanthropist has no prototype in that of the wistful Russian genius, who entreated the Deity that she might “make His acquaintance,” who lamented her inability to put forth love because she was obliged to see “human nature through the microscope,” who said: “Everybody is commonplace.” Miriam, it seems, could not think of anyone who did not offend her: “I don’t like men,” she says, “and I loathe women. I am a misanthrope.” On the eve of leaving home she watches her sister dressing, and “reflects that she need no longer hate her for the set of her clothes round her hips.”
- Miss Richardson has achieved a conscientious work. Nothing is wanting to complete the verisimilitude of her creation but that touch of sporting divergence from type whereby Nature, the parent of type, is wont to mock at and defy transcription. Miriam in each mood is so rigidly conforming to type that—truth to say — she becomes at length more than a little wearisome. Her reveries are in point. To fall into reveries and to make self-speeches is characteristic of her unhealth. She must take account of the images that chase each other on the surface of her mind. Accordingly we have pages upon pages of foolish or fevered fantasies. Once, in bed and sleepless, when “the moonlight was sad and hesitating,” she recollected, meditated, reasoned, through the space of some twelve pages in this manner:
No God. No Creation. The struggle for existence. Fighting. . . Fighting. . . Fighting. . . Everybody groping and fighting. . . Fraulein. . . Some said it was true . . . some not. They could not both be right. It was probably true . . . only old-fashioned people thought it was not. It was true. Just that—monkeys fighting. But who began it? Who made Fraulein? Tough leathery monkey. . . Then nothing matters. Just one little short life…. ‘A few more years shall roll… A few more seasons pass…’
- There was a better one than that . . . not so organ-grindery:
Swift to its close ebbs life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories fade away;
Change and decay in all around I see.
Wow-wow-wow-whiney-caterwalley. - We agree.
- The Spectator, 26 February 1916:
- With the curious taste for specializing which belongs to some of the best modern fiction-writers, who seem to avoid nothing more eagerly than the telling of a story, Miss Richardson writes only of the year or two spent by an English girl at a German school, of her impressions of German thought, her relationships with German girls, her admiration of their power to mingle music and “Goethe readings” with cooking and tranquil acceptance of future domesticity. The book is certainly clever, true and intricate in its psychology, and so unexpected in many of its details that it is evidently the account of a personal experience. But the writer has unfortunately chosen to adopt a style of writing whose brilliance depends on the use of unfinished phrases:
Certainly it was wrong to listen to sermons . . . stultifying . . , unless they were intellectual . . . lectures like Mr. Brough’s …. that was as bad, because they were not sermons. . . . Either kind was bad and ought not to be allowed . . . a homily . . . sermons… homilies … a quiet homily might be something rather nice . . . arid have not Charity — sounding brass and tinkling cymbal . . . Caritas … I have none, I am sure. . . . Fraulein Pfaff would listen.
- Pages in succession are filled with sentences such as this, and cannot but grow wearisome.
- New York Times, 31 December 1916:
- This is the first novel of a series, which, under the general title of Pilgrimage are to follow the journeys of Miriam, an English girl of independent thought and strong personality. Impelled by her father’s financial disasters, she obtains the position of English governess in a girl’s boarding school in Hanover. Thence forward, like Villette, and even more than Villette, the story is bounded by the walls of the pensionnat in which the young teacher finds abundant play for her vivid intelligence and fervent emotions. It holds no romance; that, presumably, is to come as the pilgrimage proceeds. Objectively, the book is a careful and Impartial study of the differences between the English and the German spirit, with none of the insular prejudice which colored Charlotte Bronte’s portraits of the la basse couriennes….
- The subjective side of the story is, however, that which commands the greater interest. The author does not portray Miriam: she is Miriam — Miriam thinking aloud, flinging upon the page her illusions and disillusions; her expanding mind, with its “growing pains”; her receptive responsiveness to the witchery of the new and beautiful land, with its sentiment and music: at the same time her impetuous aversions and seething revolts. We do not know that just such a thing has been done before. We close the book asking ourselves: What has life in store for this crude, eager, self-conscious girl — not yet lovable, but strangely fascinating? We leave her at a crucial point. We cannot even guess her future. We await with hope, and not a little fear, the record of her further unfolding, as we would await that of a real girl, standing at the parting of the ways between girlhood and womanhood, for, to quote Mr. Beresford’s preface, “Miriam is, indeed, one with life.”
- The more we muse upon what Miss Richardson has achieved in this book the more remarkable does it seem. In the volumes to follow she will be her own most formidable rival. If in these she observes, as she has done in Pointed Roofs, the ancient precept, “Look in thine heart and write,” she need fear nothing,