The following review by the poet and novelist Babette Deutsch appeared in the 18 February 1939 issue of The Nation.
It would appear, if the Times reviewer is an index to literary opinion, that Miss Richardson’s extraordinary novel is fated to remain the caviar of a small and scattered group of devout Richardsonians and a mere mess of salty, sticky fish eggs to the general. And yet I am as convinced as I have ever been during the twenty years in which I have repeatedly pleaded for it that this author has only begun to find her proper audience. The fact that Pilgrimage has actually been brought out in four stout volumes more than two decades after the appearance of the first “chapter,” as Miss Richardson calls each book, would point to a like conviction in other quarters. Publishers do not print books for the fun of the thing. The fun of the thing — if an adventure in awareness may be so described — is for the reader. I can only hope he will at last find it.
The first volume in the series was published in England in 1915. It had been completed two years earlier, and was thus contemporary with the appearance of the first part of Proust’s life work and with Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In her foreword the author mentions these experiments, and also glances briefly at such fellow-pilgrims toward realism as Balzac, Bennett, Henry James, and, without naming her, Virginia Woolf. She might, too, have mentioned May Sinclair, whose Mary Olivier, published in 1919, ia condensed and somewhat vulgarized version of what Miss Richardson has done with exquisite subtlety on a major scale.
The special quality which distinguishes Miss Richardson from these writers is her emphasis upon the feminine consciousness. As a result she has been called, mistakenly, a feminist, or slighted, again mistakenly, as dealing in gossipy trivialities. What she has actually produced is the history of a woman’s mind, in the fullest sense of that word, a history so intimate and penetrating that, were it not for the testimony of a few men — Frank Swinnerton, be it noted, along with Ford Madox Ford — one might suspect that only a woman could appreciate her performance.
It has been objected that the woman she chose to present is a person of small importance. She is a middle-class English girl who begins life, toward the close of the last century, in the serene setting of a comfortable suburban family, is early thrown upon her own resources, holds several jobs as a governess: abroad and at home, settles down as a dental secretary in London, where she lives in a shabby boarding house encountering other unimportant people and a scattering of not much more interesting intellectuals, has a holiday in Switzerland, and is. last s pest on her way to a retreat above Geneva, where she will presumably neither engage in any prodigious activity nor become the heroine of any profound private drama. It is a pre-war world, and though she meets such odd people as socialists, suffragettes, and even a Russian Jew (the one implausible character), her experiences belong to that remote and placid past. Where, then, is the interest? Where the significance? What, under the sun or moon, are these nineteen hundred-odd pages about?
The interest is in the incomparable intensity and richness with which the quality of given moments is presented. The significance is that of life itself, in the mere living. “Mere existence isn’t life,” one of her lovers says to Miriam Henderson, making the same objection that certain critics make of her creator’s material. “Why mere?” she responds. “Most people have too much life and too little realization. Realization takes time and solitude. They have neither.” And it is precisely realization that these volumes are about, that, in fact, they are. One of their values is that they leave the reader with a heightened awareness of the most unconsidered ele- ments in his own daily experience. They perform the supreme service of literature, that of increasing consciousness, even when they seem to deal with trivia. They have the virtue Emily Dickinson ascribed to letters when she said: “A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” That is, perhaps, the nature of all literature, even where, as here, it gives so fully the sense of the corporeal, substantial, commonplace universe. There is not much time. There is almost no solitude. But they are worth the effort of achieving, in order to share this adventure.