Pilgrimage at the Harry Ransom Center

In January 2025, I had a chance to spend a few days in Austin, Texas. A few weeks before the trip, I mentioned it to my friend Colm McKenna, who immediately replied that I should take time to visit the Harry Ransom Center on the University of Texas Austin campus. One of America’s biggest and most generously endowed archives, the Ransom Center is legendary, in particular, for its incredible collection of the papers of major figures of 20th century English literature and of publishers such as Alfred A. Knopf.

I hadn’t considered it prior to Colm’s suggestion, having no research project underway for which the sort of things I knew the Ransom Center held would be useful, but it seemed a good use of my spare time in Austin. Once I went to search the collection for interesting material, though, I remembered that the Center was one of the few archives holding any papers by Dorothy Richardson. And in particular, it has the surviving fragment (around 33,000 words) of Dimple Hill, as well as a first edition copy of Clear Horizon, one of the few (only?) with its dust jacket intact. The only other Pilgrimage manuscripts are those of Pointed Roofs and March Moonlight, held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and Dawn’s Left Hand, at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.

The Ransom Center’s copies of the Dimple Hill manuscript and the first edition of Clear Horizon had a practical value at the time of my visit. After obtaining the rights to publish a limited US edition of Pilgrimage in November 2024, I had been preparing the texts for typesetting. A key decision I took was to base the text of each chapter-volume on its first edition. Most readers know Pilgrimage from the 1979 Virago Modern Classics edition, which in turn used page images from the 1967 J. M. Dent edition, which included, posthumously, the text of March Moonlight. Aside from March Moonlight, however, this edition was itself based on the 1938 Dent and Cresset Press texts, which included the first edition of Dimple Hill. (I don’t blame anyone for getting lost along the way: it’s a complicated trail.) The 1938/1967 texts are further embedded in Richardson scholarship as the source referred to in the vast majority of articles and books on Pilgrimage, including George Thomson’s two guides, A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1996) and Notes on Pilgrimage: Dorothy Richardson Annotated (1999).

Dorothy Richardson took an active role in revising her texts for the 1938 edition of Pilgrimage. With the likely assent of, if not pressure from, her publisher, Richardson standardized numerous aspects: spelling, the treatment of foreign words and phrases, the numbering of chapters and sections, and punctuation. As an example, all four remaining manuscripts clearly show that Richardson consistently used double quotation marks to indicate speech.

Up to and including the first edition of Dawn’s Left Hand (Duckworth, 1931), so did her publisher. But sometime in the mid-1930s, British publishers standardized on using single quotation marks, and with the 1938 edition, the entire text was changed to align with this practice.

In her Foreword to the 1938 edition, Richardson apologized for her “nonstandard” earlier practices, thanking Duckworth…

For the opportunity…of eliminating this source of a reputation for creating avoidable difficulties, and of assembling the scattered chapters of Pilgrimage in their proper relationship, the author desires here to express her gratitude and, further, to offer to all those readers who have persisted in spite of every obstacle, a heart-felt apology.

Her apology was not only unnecessary but something of an insult to Richardson’s earlier self. From the very beginning of Pilgrimage, she was experimenting. As Adam Guy and Scott McCracken puts it in their essay, “Editing Experiment: The New Modernist Editing and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage“ (Modernist Cultures, 15:1):

Across the time of Pilgrimage’s composition, Richardson tried out a range of different experimental, ‘constructive methods’, each of which risked the possibility of their own failure. At every level, from the micro-structure of the sentence to the internal structures of sections, chapters, and volumes, Richardson’s aim was for an open design marked by gaps and silences that grant the reader a collaborative role in the creation of the narrative. This disruptive technique starts at the level of the sentence, where Richardson experimented with punctuation in order first to arrest the reader and then invite their participation.

This presented the editors of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Dorothy Richardson, the first attempt at giving Richardson a properly-researched and presented authoritative set of texts, with a dilemma: stick with the 1938 edition or go back to the originals? Guy and McCracken make a succinct and convincing argument for going back to the originals: “What the 1938 collected edition gained in consistency, it lost in smoothing over the experimental and inconclusive nature of Richardson’s art.”

The nature of experimentation in any art form is to introduce innovations that are unfamiliar and challenging to the reader, listener, or viewer. But such innovations are more than just obstacles. Indeed, the point of the experimentation is to force us out of habitual responses and into moments of disorientation that open new ways of perception and understanding. Ludwig Wittgenstein is often quoted as saying, “If a lion could talk we wouldn’t understand him.” But I’d argue that even if we wouldn’t understand the lion’s perception of the world, we would come closer to understanding the ways in which it differed from ours. Throughout the writing of Pilgrimage, Richardson strived to convey Miriam Henderson’s way of perceiving the world even as she accepted that her experiments could no more be fully successful than a talking lion could hope to be fully successful in enabling humans to perceive the world as he does.

Richardson presented another challenge, more for her editors than her readers, in Clear Horizon and Dimple Hill: she dispensed with chapters. Instead, she broke her text into unnumbered sections, each separated by four or five lines of text — literally writing “4 lines” or “5 lines” in the manuscript.

Having access to the first edition of Clear Horizon showed that for this chapter-volume, Duckworth complied with Richardson’s approach. There are no chapter or section numbers, merely breaks as Richardson intended. Here, for example, you can see a break of five lines:

In Dimple Hill, the last chapter-volume to be published separately, however, chapter numbers were restored, and Clear Horizon was changed to conform in the 1938 edition.

Richardson scholars — and especially those working on the Oxford Edition — will forever regret that only four of Richardson’s Pilgrimage manuscripts survive. One letter in the Ransom Center collection helps explain why. In a letter to the literary agent Curtis Brown from November 1934, Richardson writes that an American collector has offered to buy all her manuscripts. Unfortunately, she explains,

Therefore when recently an American reader, who apparently has collected first editions of my books, a few of them signed, wrote to ask whether I possessed any manuscripts I should be willing to part with on terms he might find manageable + on condition that any manuscripts purchased by him should remain in his library + not appear on the open market, I replied that I had kept only two manuscripts, that of the first + of the last, to date, of my set, either of which I should be willing to sell.

Richardson and her husband, Alan Odle, spent their years together itinerant and usually desperately poor. When they moved, they carried their belongings in a few suitcases, and among the things that had to be sacrificed for the sake of mobility were her manuscripts. In November 1934, that meant she had only the manuscripts of Pointed Roofs and Dawn’s Left Hand. Clear Horizon was with Duckworth. To these were added the two remaining chapter-volumes: Dimple Hill and March Moonlight. The fate of the manuscript of Clear Horizon is unknown, but we can assume she dispensed with it as soon as she had a new “last” — Dimple Hill — to replace it.

Seeing Richardson’s manuscripts provides a powerful reminder of just how much her work was constrained by poverty. Some of the pages of the Pointed Roofs manuscript at the Beinecke are written on letterhead paper she must have been given by a friend or taken from some office. Dimple Hill is carefully written, without the profuse markouts and corrections of writers like Joyce or Balzac, on what is clearly an ordinary pad of lined notepaper:

It’s a rare and special privilege to be able to look through the pages that Dorothy Richardson worked on, filled with lines of elegant but precise cursive, the pages from which Miriam Henderson and her world emerge. The large gaps that exist due to the loss of her manuscripts and other papers make it difficult, if not possible, to fully and accurately reproduce her texts as intended, without the interference of publishers and editors. But my time at the Ransom Center did enable me to take a few steps closer in preparing the texts of the new Libroj Books US edition of Pilgrimage, which reintroduce what some readers consider obstacles but that I hope honor the spirit of Richardson’s innovation and experimentation.