The following, from Gloria Fromm’s introduction to Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson (1995), raises an interesting question about how to see Pilgrimage — one that may make sense for readers accustomed to the many forms of autofiction that have been published in recent years.
Forty years old when she began to write Pilgrimage, just before the First World War, she spent the rest of her life at work on it, a series books about herself as Miriam Henderson from seventeen to forty. Every year — or two, or three — as another chapter-volume appeared, the distance in time grew between the writing self and the fictional self, between the events as they had actually occurred and her memory (or use) of them. Over the years, then, nearly forty to be exact as Richardson the “new woman” was growmg old, Pilgrimage developed into a complex, many-layered autobiographical fiction: but the majority of its readers — unaware of its basis in fact — responded to Miriam Henderson as a character in a serial novel, more interesting initially for the method by which she was presented than as a consciousness in herself. Although Dorothy Richardson allowed, perhaps even preferred, Pilgrimage to be read as a novel, she was also convinced of the importance and value of her experience as a woman; it was this story — as cultural autobiography — that she had committed herself to telling, in detail and with extraordinary faithfulness to states of mind and feeling. And it was precisely this story — so different in its “feminine” materials from those of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus or Proust’s Marcel — that met with the most resistance. The novel-reading world was ready, more or less, to grapple with the scrambled consciousness of Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom but not with Miriam Henderson’s — not prepared, in other words, to feel enclosed (“trapped” was the word many readers used) in the mind and emotional experience of a very young, very naive English girl. She would grow up in the course of Pilgrimage to become its author, but her future, in the early chapter-volumes, was painfully unclear. Yet one of Richardson’s principal aims in writing Pilgrimage was to chart — with the utmost fidelity — the education of her heroine’s sensibility in the late Victorian and Edwardian world of her own youth. She meant Miriam Henderson, however, to represent much more than herself, to represent a generation and a class of women in cultural transition. Thus, the autobiographical basis of Pilgrimage did not need to be known, for Richardson rightly felt that it had not only integrity and coherence as fiction but also authority as historical record.