With the publication of Honeycomb, the critics started pitching their tents on the two sides of Pilgrimage question. Those who thought little of Dorothy Richardson’s experiment would, for the most part, move on to other issues, tired of both her style and her troublesome heroine Miriam. Those who not only appreciated her work but considered it groundbreaking probably little suspected that they might have to continue to advocate for Richardson for the next several decades.
- Harold Hannyngton Child, The Times Literary Supplement, 18 October 1917
- In Honeycomb, Miss Dorothy M. Richardson continues the story of Miriam, and the fourth and final volume, The Tunnel, is in preparation. Miriam has been engaged as governess by some wealthy people in the country, and, after her life in the suburban home and in the schools where she taught, she much enjoys the luxury. The spring comes into the rooms, and fills, her blood. She responds to the beauty and comfort of a well-managed house. But the restless, critical creature, ever on the search for what is real, soon becomes dissatisfied. The people who live this sort of life are all keeping up a pretence. They are not alive, but dead. Instead of living, they are all playing a game, combining in a conspiracy to shut out truth and nature. Miriam, testing all things and people by that self of which she is always intensely and securely conscious, sees them all as shams. There is no resting-place among them for this lonely soul, mistrustful of all except the self that she knows and trusts.
- Written in a rapid succession of jerks and gasps, with words and stops and fragments of sentences shaken, one might fancy, out of a pepper-pot — the breathless ejaculations of one who has run a mile to deliver some exciting news — the book succeeds, through the author’s intensity of feeling and thought, in conveying (in defiance of all the laws of good writing) a clear impression of the girl and of the society at Newlands. We have failed to hit on any rule that governs Miss Richardson’s process of selection ; we do not know — and shall not until The Tunnel is published, if then — whether Miriam has left her place at Newlands to take, up the care of her all-but-imbecile mother, or whether she is only on a holiday. Yet we feel that we know the Corries and the Kronens and the Staple-Cravens, and the life at Newlands, and Miriam herself, that hungry, eager, self-centred young nature. If ever Miss Richardson were to write about people who did not interest her keenly, her present method would land her in untold trouble. As it is, the uneven surface is the surface of Miriam’s being; the jerks and gasps are the partings of Miriam’s heart, with its aspirations and checks and dashes out to life; and, tiresome though it often is, the book holds our interest close to a young person who is intensely and independently “alive.”
- Frank Swinnerton, The Manchester Guardian, 24 November 1917
- As one reads this odd, half-uttered book about a governess and the people she meets one is overwhelmed by the multitude of little things which Miriam, the narrator, must have noticed in the course of her life. They are very little things, and they have been noted, and arbitrary interpretations placed upon them, with such intensity that they have come to mean more to her than many larger things can do, until the trees have obscured the wood. The book is like a record of life made by somebody who dwells, and has always dwelt, in a box in the dining-room. When she hears curious sounds from without she explains them in terms of her own little boxsoul, until they make a collection of incongruous sounds echoing against the tiny walls of her home. Of horizons, in spite of fragmentary notes of discontent with the unreality of ordinary intercourse, one finds small trace. Miriam clearly has standards of her own, but they are small, remote; and in all her observations she hardly ever suggests that the people observed do’anything but discard fragments of their character for her avid scrutiny.
- One can hardly make a novel out of impressions without conceptions. The method is essentially cramped and sedentary; persons drift into the neighbourhood of the box, and their dropped words, carefully caught and transfixed, are left in the air to stand for revelations. Henry James’s telegraphist in “In the Cage” guessed as often as Miriam, but more successfully, for she guessed, as it were, constructively, and from her guessings there develops under Henry James’s hand, through the medium of her glimpses and fathomings, a novel that is recognisably a drama and an interpretation of continuous life; Miriam only guesses detached soul-states, which depend for interest upon their individual excellence. When they are very quick and sufficiently important they give one queer jerks of recognition. But the defect of the book and, it seems to us, of Miriam’s method as a whole is that successive jerks rise no higher and spread no wider, so that Honeycomb does not, by itself at any rate, signify anything beyond a restless concern with little things and a scries of little guesses beyond demeanour into the dark forests that lie behind.
- Unamed, The Nation, 24 November 1917
- The most remarkable novel of the year, from the critic’s standpoint, we should judge is Honeycomb, the third of the series in which Miss Richardson chronicles the life of her heroine, Miriam Henderson. For the highly impressionistic style she has developed makes a break with current methods in fiction, and creates a new instrument for woman’s expression of her apprehension of life. Women are instinctively pragmatists. They feel things are so-and-so, and deal with facts as with their families, taking the line of least resistance, yielding to or eluding circumstances they cannot control, ignoring what is “tiresome,” seizing the essential and manipulating it skilfully to aid their design. They do not need to walk all round a subject and “form conclusions” like men. They know that realities are infinitely more subtle, contradictory, variegated, deceptive than men understand, and yet generally can be coaxed into line with patience and craft.
This feminine power of discerning the heart of facts at a glance — for woman judges by the tell-tale detail which man often fails to observe — is much more easily expressed in language by shades of tone than by the clearest or fullest descriptions. It is really the fresh living feeling about life and people and nature that women specially should secure, not the intellectualized statement which is so apt to be deadened in writing. But art is frightfully exacting in its demands on life and time, and women more than men recoil from expending the precious hours of sensation in perfecting mere expression.
Miss Richardson shows much original daring in trusting implicitly to her nervous fluid states of feeling to build up for us pictures purely feminine in their mobility and receptivity. With her we swim in and out of scenes, where the moment declares the values behind appearances, in spiritual flash-lights. The youthful heroine, Miriam, now a governess in the country house of a rich, smart, fairly nice English family, nestles down into its luxury, which laps her in light and fragrant warmth. But though rejoicing in it and snatching at the fresh sensations and excitements of its careless worldliness, she sees clearly that “these people were not happy. They were not real.” - Neither clever, successful Mr. Corrie, a leading Q.C., nor sweet, bright Mrs. Corrie, living for her children, but “sad and lonely inside,” nor magnificently solid Mrs. Kronen, with her lovely, wonderful West-end flat and her secret, “she doesn’t care a rap about him, not a teeny rap . . she’s a wise lady—dollars — that’s the thing; she’ll never have any kiddies,” nor Mr. and Mrs. Steeple-Craven, who, on meeting, “have to say something to each other,” nor Joey Banks, with her caressing, smiling eyes, who “worries about her looks, just like any other girl” — none of these people seem really to seize the happiness they are chasing. They are “fair masks,” keeping it up with jollity, having no end of a good time; but their happiness is a bit metallic. This conclusion is inferred rather than stated. Miriam apprehends through the gay, easy, jolly worldliness of these people something sated, calculating, uncanny and restless. The extreme femininity of the author’s method lies in Miriam’s conveying all the meaning little shades in people’s behavior, the motives sneaking in their hearts. Nothing escapes her registration. She passes no judgment as a man would do. She accepts it all for what it is, just as one accepts the wetness of water, or the coming of the evening.
- And it is really remarkable how the swift darting impressionism of her intuitive criticism discards as superfluous the usual recital of facts and circumstances, that clog up our latter-day novelists’ pictures. Modern life is so stuffed with details, so swift in its transitions, so confused in its embarrassing welter of impressions and feelings, that it is imperative for the artist to select only the essential fact, the one tiny fact that “gives away” what is in the appearances. For example, Miriam, in driving in a hansom with Bob Greville, a tired, elderly clubman, “glances with loathing at the pointed collar that stuck out across the three firm little folds under the clean-shaven chin.” After that we know all about Bob’s waste of time in being nice to her, showing her his bachelor chambers, and finally getting to the point of asking, “Are you happy, dear girl? Do you like being with old Bob in his den?” It’s all a waste of time for Bob.
- Miss Richardson sums up and disposes of the episode in two little pictures, where the ordinary novelist would need half-a-dozen chapters. The economy of the author’s impressionistic method, of course, has been practised by others, notably by Henry James in his “middle period”; but Miss Richardson has contrived like nobody else to forge an instrument by which the feminine method of apprehending life reveals itself in unerring divination.
- Unnamed, The New York Sun, 7 July 1918
- The reader of Dorothy Richardson’s Honeycomb has momentary wonderings as to whether he, or the author, is insane. Here is an interesting type of mental affection, but one that would be extremely annoying if protracted for a great length of time. The reader is absolutely sure, however, that the characters in the novel are paranoiacs.
- The book is an exotic piece of fiction, an advanced example of impressionistic narrative. There is no action to speak of, no structure of plot, no ladder of interest, no climax. The value of the book, pronounced and striking at limes, is in description rather than in narration.
- What holds the reader’s attention is the vividness of the apprehensions of color, motion, sound, taste, feeling. The central character, a governess in a wealthy English home, is extraordinarily alive and has active and dreamy impressions of the things and persons about her. Her mind functions almost solely by sense impressions. She fairly revels in her feelings about everything that touches her, every person who comes within her line of vision. Her rather morbid emotions share all the neurotic egoism and overpowering superlativeness of Mary McLane’s, while unfortunately lacking the Montana spinster’s erotic imaginings.
- The volume shows excellent power of characterization without action, of analysis through appearance. The persons who come under the scrutiny of this governess hating her job are alike yet different, and she senses their real nature, their hard, bright lives cankered at the core, their outward glitter and inward lonely dullness of yearning. Probably there are such persons in the world, but it is unlikely that so many should be brought together in one small group — that there could be no relieving idealism, no trait worthy of admiration.
- The work has an unusual power of suggestiveness in description, a sympathetic sense of beauty and a poetic style of expression at times. The scenes from nature are more human, less rasping than the pictures of the men and women.
- The book is good of its kind, but no one would wish an oversupply of the kind.