This review by the novelist Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman), one of Dorothy Richardson’s closest friends and artistics and financial supporter, originally appeared in Close Up, the magazine of film criticism she published with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Kenneth Macpherson (Volume VIII, Issue 4, December 1931).
It is not possible to forget the first meeting with Miriam, the heroine of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s many volume novel, Pilgrimage. Our own memory goes back to Backwater in 1916. It was a moment when normal adolescence ceased, and although the suppression was accepted, it was a violently imposed external barrier and actual impulses made themselves felt in a hidden way, through delight in small event that made the days endurable or despair that was as old and barren as the press communiques at night. There were food queues, there was no heat in winter-damp rooms. Against this cold, and never ending anxiety, a searchlight swung in black sky. Into this suspended moment came Pilgrimage, and it its pages growth was possible.
It was a peculiar sensation, to be conscious that development was barred not because of any inward conflict, but for sheerly external reasons imposed by war. Reading Pointed Roofs and Backwater, not one but many, were able to resume for a few hours, the growth proper to their age. It was not escape, but an actual sense of movement.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Dorothy Richardson seems to express, more than any other writer, the English spirit. Her books are the best history yet written of the slow progression from the Victorian period to the modern age. She is the English Proust and like him, has written for the few, but her understanding of character is much deeper, and she sees so universally that her books belong most to the circles of workers where for some inexplicable reason, her work is little known.
Miriam becomes a teacher, in Germany and England, then a governess, then a secretary. She has a brief holiday in Switzerland, occasional country weekends, the ordinary average life of hundreds fifteen years ago, of thousands now. But this Turksib of a worker’s years is set against the background of the emerging of the modern world and of her own view of life. Unless, she says, the human being is often alone, it is impossible to appreciate the richness of human individuality; London or the countryside are only fully to be enjoyed in contrast one with the other.
What a film her books could make. The real English film for which so many are waiting. Apart from Miriam herself, the pages are filled with people, men and women who resume their whole thought and vocabulary in a few phrases or a few actions, immediately to be recognised, for they are to be met every day. Dawn’s Left Hand begins (as perhaps films should) in a railway carriage. Miriam returns from a holiday in Switzerland; the London year goes by, apparently nothing happens, underneath the surface an epoch of life, of civilisation, changes. She leaves a flat and the narrow boundaries of a social worker’s mind for the communal richness of the boarding house, familiar to readers of previous volumes.
She meets a friend, she refuses to marry a doctor, her own development progresses. And in each page an aspect of London is created that like an image from a film, substitutes itself for memory, to revolve before the eyes as we read.
This volume, the tenth in the series, is probably the finest written by Miss Richardson to date.