With the publication of The Tunnel, the number of reviews that new volumes of Pilgrimage received began a decline that continued through the release of Dimple Hill. Those who disliked or actively hated Richardson’s style simply stopped reviewing her new books entirely. Of the rest, most admired aspects of each book but remained skeptical in one way or another: either her experiments were flawed in some aspect, or her experiments were successful but unlikely to spur further imitations or developments along the lines of her approach. However, The Tunnel is noteworthy for having been reviewed by both Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, two of Richardson’s most esteemed contemporaries. These reviews will be posted separately due to their length.
- The Daily Telegraph, 28 March 1919 (uncredited)
- If the art of the novelist consists in telling a story, Miss Dorothy Richardson has undoubtedly mistaken her vocation, for she has no story to tell, and Miss May Sinclair, in an enthusiastic appreciation, assures us that it is the essence of her ideal that “There is no drama. no situation. no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on.” But, on the other hand, Miss Richardson knows thoroughly well what she is trying to do, and if the art of the newest school of fiction is justified in representing narrative as a study of a “stream of consciousness going on and on,” then she mu«t be pronounced an extremely clever, and even brilliant, exponent of a very difficult kind of literary workmanship. The point of view is punctiliously subjective. This is now the fourth volume in which Miss Richardson has been engaged in studying “the stream of consciousness” as it “goes on and on” in the mind of a single female character, Miriam Henderson. This very modern woman is rather out of sympathy with the other sex, intensely self-centred, musical, literary, super-sensitive. and with all those foibles of temperament to torture or sustain her, is thrown by Fate into the post of assisting to a partnership of dentists. It is her business to fetch and carry the implements of this peculiarly painful Profession, to whisk away napkins, to sterilise extracted teeth, and to act as a sort of general secretary and factotum to the practice as well. It would be difficult to imagine a1 more harrowing job for a highly-strung girl, and the book is. indeed, sufficiently full of unpalatable details of the life of a bustling dental surgery.
- But it is not the externals of Miriam Henderson’s daily career that constitute its chief interest — the real quality of the book lies in its extraordinarily intimate revelation of the processes of a nervous, mobile, feminine temperament. The novelist’s method is to reveal everything through the medium of her heroine’s brain: nothing happens dramatically; nothing is told from the outside; we see the stream of trivia! incidents exclusively as they affect the consciousness of Miriam Henderson. Nor is the record confined to things seen and heard. The subject’s own thoughts are mixed up with her impressions, so that the reader gets “in one” grey “tumblement,” the thing seen, the reflection it prompts, and the half-unconsciouscomment, sometimes in a merely vague idea, scarcely ripe for utterance at all, and at others in a sudden burst of song or irrelevant quotation, striking like a lurid flashlight across the register of consciousness still “streaming on and on.” Nothing like it, so far as we are aware, has been attempted before. It is at first a bewildering; experiment, but as the reader’s mind becomes attuned to the method he can hardly fail to recognise its astonishing cleverness and its almost distressing fidelity to type.
- The “stream” of Minam Henderson’s “consciousness” absorbs, by the way, a number of strange and generally vulgar people, wonderfully revealed through the effect they make upon her own mind. Their conversation is exaggerated in the very fashion that it would strike upon a sensitive taste; the reader feels instinctively the distaste felt by Miriam Henderson for surroundings which she never definitely criticises. One rises from the book with a sense of having seen life through the lobe of another person’s brein and under a white and searching light; of having, as it were, been admitted to confidence that one ought almost to be ashamed to enjoy. Such a method can never become generally popular, nor are there many young novelists who could be trusted to employ it with confidence. But Mise Dorothy Richardson has mastered her own medium, and the experiment is of the very greatest interest and suggestion. Her future is one to be waiched with lively expectation. She will undoubtedly leave her mark upon her time.
-
The Manchester Guardian, 14 March 1919 (credited to “A. M.”)
- You must accept Miss Richardson’s method if you are to get what she has to give. It partakes of the nature of a kinematograph revue helped out by the phonograph, and it reminds one, too, of those Futurist pictures, now gone the way of many spirited experiments, where you were shown the inside of house and at the same time the sights, scenes, impressions which might possibly be coming in through the windown. It is a restless method; one reader finds it a fatiguing fashion of work. But then Miss Richardson achieves by it what she set out to do — namely, to present the brain record, and thus the innter and outer history of a young woman, Miriam Henderson, during a vivid year or so of her life, in the eighties or early nineties. At first you get hte impression of everything being hurled at you, of nothing being suppressed in the kinema-phonographic whirl, but as a matter of fact there is selection — some times fine artistically. There should be more.
- The real subject is the joy of the young and vital being “on their own,” and none who have known this but will thrill to her touch. Miriam is a little dentist’s secretary, hard up, living, many would say. sordidly, with high intellectual aspirations and imperfect education, soaking in impressions at at every pore, glorying in the freedom of her evenings, over-critical, yet wonderfully lacking in the more ungenerous prejudices that bar the way to future wisdom. Others have told of the joys of friendship, of the comradeship, of association in work, in play, in causes. She has nothing to say against these, but she has her own tune. “I can’t go tonight. It’s all here [in her sordid lodging]: I Must stay here…. I musn’t get tied up [with people]; it drives everything away. Now I’ve read the letter I must go. There’ll be afterwards when I get back. No one has any power over me. I shall be coming back.” Selfish? Ah, no! This individualism has deep, strong roots, and may blossom finely.
- Well, whether we like the method or no, Miss Richardson has achieved by it a delightful series of clever portraits. Mr. Hancock, “the girls,” Mr. Orly, and to crown them all, Miss Dear, are nothing less that admirable.
-
The New York Herald, 26 October 1919 (credited to “H. S. G.”)
- When Dorothy M. Richardson is intelligible she is excellent; but when she is not, which is very, very often, she is bewildering. The Tunnel is the fourth volume in a series called Pilgrimage, which apparently designs to be the subjective rendering of Miriam Henderson’s life. The book, taken conventionalyy as a novel, starts nowhere and ends nowhere. To imagine it one must get out to some smoothly flowing stream and arbitrarily take a hundred yards of “still water” as a model. But there is something so tantalizingly attractive about it that it may not be dismissed as a tour de force in composition. First of all it is an intellectural stimulant. One must read with extreme care to extract the genuine values that run deep.
- The book is not so much the history of a human being as it is the meticulous rendering of a woman’s mind. What Miriam Henderson thinks is what counts, not what she does; and for the length of a novel the reader must follow this sometimes intricate, sometimes obvious, rendering of Miriam’s mental moods. The book shifts and fluctuates as to action. But the steady stream of consciousness of the woman who is living this life never falters. Some of her moods are obscure (perhaps this is the fault of the reviewer) and some positions seem unreal, but it goes on and on, a river of the mind. One feels that Miss Richardson too can go on forever, adding volume after volume to this series, and so take Miriam Henderson to the grave before she reaches the logical end of the theme….
- Miss Richardson has set out to perform a surprising feat, and from all appearances she has succeeded. That her method of composition will be widely popular is to be doubted. Rather will it appeal to other writers, to those earnest persons who love a superabundance of intellectual distinction in their mental food. The average reader will get through the book for a hundred pages or so, if he is really ambitious, and then put it down with a blank look and feebly wonder what it’s all about. Ah, dear reader, it is all about you; it is all about the people you know. But even this will not impress itself any too strongly upon the reader. He will look for a story and find no story. He will look for a coherent unfolding of a chracter and find no such thing. It will not occur to him that life is no story as we understand stories, or that no real character ever coherently unfolds. These are things that Miss Richardson has sensed and tried to intimate….
- Miss Richardson’s ability to project her character and to present Miriam’s stream of consciousness, giving a sense of actuality, lifts The Tunnel above a mere ambitious attempt. The reader, although he may not understand, never doubts the truthfulness of Miriam Henderson’s mind. He feels a living personality. It is this realization that makes those who do read Miss Richardson take her quite seriously.