Just as Backwater began to make clear the direction of Dorothy Richardson’s approach to both her fiction and her heroine, so did the reactions of its initial reviewers begin to set the patterns of their reception: those who understood and appreciated what she was trying to do grew more enthusiastic; and those who did not grew more hardened in their dislike.
- Walter de la Mare, Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1916:
- In Backwater, Miss Dorothy Richardson continues the life story of a young English girl which she began in Pointed Roofs. Miriam Henderson was then—many years before the war—a teacher in a German school in Hanover. Sho is now home in England (in the London where the top-left-front corner of a horse-’bus is still a coign [corner] of ecstasy). She is just eighteen, “has put up her hair to-day” in preparation for her career as a resident governess in a school for the daughters of gentlemen kept by the queer, amiable, superannuated Miss Deborah, Miss Jennie, and Miss Haddie Fernie.Miriam’s is not a very large world, with its family of sisters, their chaff and slang and raptures, their music and books and friends and lovers, and poor old Victorian “mum-jam”, helplessly cowed by her husband and by thickening money worries. Nor is there much incident in it-—the last gay little dance before the crash, the few weeks’ seaside holiday at Brighton, the visit to the Crystal Palace on firework night, and the raw, noisy, suburban routine at Wordsworth House.
- Thirty years ago Backwater would have been merely a “wholesome” story-book for girls, an admirable good conduct prize for Miss Deborah’s favourite and most influential pupil. To-day the perspective, the scale of values, the outlook and intention, have all changed. The exotic seed of the Brontës is producing extraordinary fruit. Miss Richardson’s tacit but essential assumption is that life is an intensely real and rich, a desperately complex and wonderful, experience, however commonplace its circumstances may be.
- The courage and orginality, the beauty and pathos, of her story are all bound up in this one fine intention—to be faithfully true to Miriam, to record her particular experience in her own personal terms. Everything else is sacrificed to this ideal—“plot,” novelistic convention, even lucid sequence of narrative. This is how Miriam met existence, what she thought, what she dreamed—above all, what she felt. This, in her own words, however “ugly and cruel,” jejune or ecstatic, the ordeal—“this is me being alive!” In other words, this novel is a piece of the purest and, in a sense, barest impressionism. If in its steady obedience to its chosen truth it fails, as we think it will sometimes fail, to convince its readers of its verisimilitude, then so far that impressionism has defeated itself. If we complain of its barrenness of incident, of its suburbanity, its disjointedness, or remain unmoved by Miriam’s conflict with herself and her environment and with the unrealized obsession which gnaws at her being—that of sex—then it is our sympathies which are to blame. We may, too (justifiably), for Miriam’s story is as yet unfinished, object to fiction by large “installments.”
- But such systematic sincerity as Miss Richardson’s is a profound and affecting thing to share in, She is still learning her method. It plays her odd tricks at times, and can mislead her into the trite, the emotional, and the incoherent. But she teaches us not only to understand but to love her Miriam. We follow her life with increasing interest and eagerly wish her well; that she may not lose her way, that she may win to her true self and inmost reality, and no at last as happy as life permits a brave and sensitive soul to be. To the novelist who does this for us we owe the truest gratitude.
- Richard King, The Tatler, 2 August 1916:
- You will remember that some time ago I praised a novel called Pointed Roofs by a new writer, Dorothy Richardson. It is the sort of story you either enjoy or can’t even wade through the second chapter. It all depends on the point of view and the type of the reader who reads it. Certainly as a story alone it could not have been more banal. It was merely a study of the early years of a young girl, a young girl whose emotional detachment from everything which happened to her stamped her as at once cold by temperament and frankly very young — young with that youthfulness which believes that it is wonderful and unlike anyone else who has ever been born into this wicked world.
- Well, Miss Richardson has now published a further instalment of this young woman’s emotional development, and those who found the manner of Pointed Roofs interesting will find Backwater certainly no less enthralling, and perhaps even more so. Miss Richardson has once again successfully conveyed the impression that her reader is not only watching the development of her heroine, but is the heroine herself. Her telling of it has all the vague, often disjointed, but curiously intimate and personal impressionism of real thought. Her detachment from all the emotions which are stirring her characters is interesting. Her book is not for those who like to lose themselves in an exciting story; but for those who realise that the author is giving us some incidents of life as viewed by a girl whose intellect seems to have stunted her emotion, who is undoubtedly attractive as a type if cold as a companion, the book is quite absorbing. At any rate it is original, and originality in a world of echoes is always an event of some importance.
- The Saturday Review, 5 August 1916:
- Backwater is a sequel to Pointed Roofs, which left Miriam, the young heroine, returning home after a period as assistant teacher at a German school. This fact should have been explained clearly at the beginning of the book, which needs all the possible light that can be thrown on it. It appears that Miss Richardson is recognised as a writer whose method is original; but in so far as that method consists of writing telegraphese, and putting words by themselves with full-stops after them, it is not to be commended. Nothing is gained by it equal to the handicaps which it imposes on the reader. To be obscure is not to be great. Our interest in the book, which is considerable, would be increased if it were more coherent.
- The author has a curious gift of vision, and it is this that makes her heroine real and attractive, in spite of whimsies. She is cleverly contrasted with her more normal sisters and the harsh-voiced, slangy Philistinism of the North London girl. “Wot’s the bally shindy, beloved?” says one of these to another. Miriam loses a lover after treating him in an off-hand way, and teaches in a school of the old-fashioned sort run by some old maids, leaving it at the end. That is all that happens. Her emotions, her dissatisfaction with life and current religion, and her feeling of dark isolation fill up the book. We cannot really expect anyone, from her mother downwards, to understand her. She won, without seeking for it, the love of the schoolchildren. They clung round her, and she saw that she could dominate them, “adoring her — as a goddess — and hating her. Even as they fawned she knew they were fighting between their aching desire for a perfection of tenderness in her and their fear lest she should fulfil the desire”. This passage is a fair instance of the author’s subtlety. It is over-strained now and again, but it includes some acute criticism of life.
- The Nation, 19 August 1916:
- Miss Richardson’s intriguing novel, Backwater, ought to have been better than it is. It is an ambitious story of a vigorous, dissatisfied, subtle young woman, Miriam Henderson, who is a mistress at Wordsworth House School for girls for a period of fifteen months. Part of the rambling, dissipated interest of the book is due to the fact that the author, following the recently fashionable device of reverting to the Victorian three-decker tradition, has a sequel to come in another volume. But only part; for Miss Richardson’s analysis of Miriam’s psychology is as yet rather incoherent. “What was there in the world?” “God! What a filthy world!”; ‘‘everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed into it” ; “oh, damn, damn, I don’t know.”That is about as far as Miriam gets, and we may add that though Miriam is obsessed with the sense of her own loneliness, she is certainly not unique in expressing such sentiments. It is time, indeed, that the more intelligent type of novelist went a step further than throwing off inarticulate disquietudes into the void. Such is not the way of the artist. Not that Miss Richardson belongs to the school of novelists who of recent years have, with exclamatory egoisms and insincerities, seduced readers who ought to know better. We feel all the time that such a method is with her a condescension. Her fresh and admirable remarks about education have nothing fluffy and ragged about them.
- The Manchester Guardian, 25 August 1916:
- Why by shouldn’t novelists introduce their readers to the personages in their books? There is something uncivil in hurling Harrietts and Megs and Nans and Eves at you, leaving you to struggle on in their company, confusedly searching for identities and relationships, piecing together clues, jotting down on a bit of paper any helpful suggestions and wondering at the end of the book whether you have really got them sorted out. There are people who cannot read War and Peace in any comfort without a list of the characters with all their names to hand; but Tolstoy does give you the material for this list; the author of this little book leads you a great dance of inferences as to who’s who. and one sees no reason for the mystery. If she can’t be bothered to tell you in the course of her story, she might make a list of dramatis personae at the beginning—“Men women, and teachers,” say, or any other suitable classification. We throw out the hint, because we are promised a further instalment of Miriam’s life, and we should like to read it with unchecked pleasure.
- It is a pleasure to read about Miriam. Her life is told in episodes—a dance, a day up the river, the routine of school, and the odd little scraps of talk with her employers; all through we get the vivid and scrappy commentary of a very young but very independent mind, haunted by the fear and oppression of a fate which means the denial of colour and freedom and variety. Miriam is a vivacious child, but she has somehow become a teacher: “This stranger saw her only as a teacher. That was what she had become. If she was really a teacher now, just that in life, it meant that she must decide at once whether she really meant to teach always. Evervone now would think of her as a teacher, as someone who was never going to do anything else, when really she had not even begun to think about doing any of the things that professional teachers had to do.” Miriam shrinks with a cold dread from this burying alive, and desperately, recklessly, throws up her situation. She has no doubt at all that she is really right to do this. When she is left alone after her resignation, she watches the little maid Flora, with “serenely despairing” face, clear away the supper things, and muses on all the barrenness of enslaved lives: “Death would take her into a great festival—things for herself. She would not believe it, and would put up her hands to keep it off. But it would be all round her in great laughter,’ like the deep roaring and crying of a flood.” The key is “things for herself.”
- Not that she is selfish. Not that she is incapable of sacrifice, adventure, heroism perhaps. But she knows that all these things are of value only if they are given, not if they are taken from you. By the very intensity of her own personality she knows these things and craves for the richness of giving. She has sone genius for teaching: “She bitterlv resented their vision of children as malleable subordinates. And there were manv moments when she seemed to be silently exchanging this determination of hers with her pupils. Good or bad, she knew it was the secret of her influence with them, and so long as she was faithful to it both she and they enjoyed their hours together. Very often she was tired, feeble with fatigue, and scamping all opportunities; this too they understood and never took advantage of her. One or two of them would, even when she failed, try to keep things going on her own method. All this was sheer happiness to her, the bread and wine of her days.”
- Yearnings she has, in her own natural kind: “She would become like a kind of nun, making a bare subsistence, but so beloved always, so quivering and tender and responsive, that human love would never fail her and when strength failed there would be hands held out toshelter her decline. But the vision never held her for more than a moment. There was something in the thought of such pure personal sentiment that gave her a feeling of treachery towards the children. Mentally she flung them out and off, made them stand upright and estranged.” There is no room for such as Miriam in the education of the young, which require: lives dedicated to narrowness, stunted and artificially sterilised. Inevitably one is led to meditations upon a more vital system of education, one which would not require the mutilation of the lives of men, and still more of women.
- Mr. Bertrand Russell suggested in the course of some recent lectures that education would gain prodigiously if many more people taught for only a few hours a week, making their chief occupation either the practising of what they taught or some quite other pursuit. One would like to meet Miriam later in life, married, with children of her own, and teaching for part of her time; or lecturing in a training college; or Minister of Education. One would like to think her joy in life, her romance, her young fire wore all going to fertilise her maturity for public as well as private uses.