Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage is easily the most neglected of the great works of modernist English literature, and this site is one attempt to change that situation. Richardson herself is partly to blame for that neglect. She wrote it over the course of over four decades, so that many of her original readers were no longer around by the time its last volume appeared and many of her new reviewers hadn’t been reading along since the publication of Pointed Roofs in 1915. She never ended Pilgrimage, and never stopped writing it until age forced her to. March Moonlight, the last of what Richardson called the “chapter-volumes” of Pilgrimage, was never completed and was not published until the first full edition of Pilgrimage was released by J. W. Dent in 1967.
One can summarize Pilgrimage as the impressionistic account of the thoughts and experiences of Miriam Henderson, an English woman, from the age 17 to age 39, loosely based on Dorothy Richardson’s own life. Although raised in an upper-middle-class family, she is forced to support herself after her father’s bankruptcy, and she tries several jobs before taking one as an assistant in a London dental office. She remains there for over ten years, until she begins working as a writer. Pilgrimage ends with Miriam meeting a man much as Richardson met the eccentric graphic artist Alan Odle in 1915 and, we presume, later marrying him as Richardson did Odle in 1919. (The couple remained together, living an itinerant and poor life, until his death in 1949.)
Even though some have suggested that The Tunnel, the fourth chapter-volume, is the best book to turn to if one only wants to sample Richardson’s work, the fact is that Richardson never stopped experimenting with everything from style and structure to punctuation throughout the entire process of writing Pilgrimage. To return to Pointed Roofs, the first chapter-volume, written in 1914, after finishing March Moonlight, which she worked on intermittently from 1946 to 1951, is to return to Richardson’s adolescence as a writer. Not only is Richardson’s heroine, Miriam Henderson, a girl of 17, naive, impressionable, and often full of the wrong-headedness of youth, but Richardson herself is just beginning to explore how to write the work she wanted to write.
She had no models to guide her. Though a prodigious and astute reader, Richardson was unsatisfied by both the style and stories she found in the English novel. Much as Pilgrimage is the story of Miriam Henderson’s search for a way of living that was not based on the limited number of models available to women at the time — wife; mother; spinster; prostitute; nun — so the creation of Pilgrimage is the story of Dorothy Richardson’s search for a fictional approach that captured what she wanted to convey: the immediacy of experience as faithfully as prose could allow. And Richardson expected her readers to follow along, even as she played with time, skipping from present to flashback and then from flashback to a new present without the scaffolding of references — dates, places, time elapsed — expected in more conventional fiction. She provides no handrails, and many readers find the sense of disorientation one often experiences in reading Pilgrimage simply too great to be endured.
But readers can mitigate this sense of disorientation by remembering a few principles underlying Richardson’s approach:
- We are always with Miriam
- Miriam knows what she knows at the time
- Miriam does not know what she does not yet know
- Miriam’s thoughts and experiences are not presented as a continuous stream but as individual moments
- Miriam’s thoughts and experiences can jump backward (as recollections), but not forward
- Richardson’s method prohibits giving the reader signposts: that would require her to step outside Miriam
- Richardson’s method allows her to deviate from the autobiographical, so timelines, characters, and incidents do not always match Richardson’s own life exactly
Richardson was never anything but ferociously her own person, and that person was most definitely female. As Derek Stanford wrote in an obituary piece in 1957, “In all the two thousand pages of Pilgrimage there is not one effort to see the world from a man’s point of view.” Pilgrimage was, for Richardson, more than a work of fiction. Indeed, much of what occurs to Miriam Henderson, the heroine of the novels, is what happened to Richardson. The places, events, and characters can almost all be traced to their real counterparts in her life. As Horace Gregory wrote in his marvelous introduction to her work, Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery (1967), “To reread Pilgrimage today is to recognize that this particular work of art is closer to the art of autobiography than to fiction.”
Yet Pilgrimage is also much more than Richardson’s autobiography. I think Gregory got it right: writing the books was Richardson’s form of self-discovery. One of Richardson’s earliest supporters, the novelist May Sinclair, mistook her technique as imaginative in a purely fictional sense, referring to William James’ phrase, the stream of consciousness:
In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on…. In identifying herself with this life which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. No attitude or gesture of her own is allowed to come between her and her effect.
Writing to an inquiring reader some thirty years after beginning Pilgrimage, Richardson was a little uncomfortable with the “autobiography” label but most definite that what the books weren’t was fiction:
If by “autobiographical” you intend the telling of the story of a life, then, though all therein depicted is dictated from within experience, Pilgrimage is certainly not an autobiography. Nearer the mark, though too suggestive of “science” in the narrowed, modern application of that term, would be “an investigation of reality.” The term novel as applied to my work took me by surprise; but I did not then know what was beginning to happen to “the novel.
Vincent Brome, who was the last person to interview Richardson, shortly before her death in 1957, tried to capture what she described as the experience of writing the books: “She would feel herself surrendering to the consciousness of what seemed to be another person, to look out on that brilliant world, awaiting the final metempsychosis … until all signs of self-consciousness vanished and she was no longer herself; and then disconcertingly, it seemed to her that this other world had identities with a buried self dimly apprehended in states of reverie. Her plunge had become a plunge into her own unconscious.” When she reached this point, Richardson said, the writing flowed, accompanied with “a sense of being upon a fresh pathway.”
Indeed, in the final volume of Pilgrimage, March Moonlight, Miriam/Dorothy defined writing as a form of establishing reality from her reflections:
While I write, everything vanishes but what I contemplate. The whole of what is called “the past” is with me, seen anew, vividly… It moves, growing with one’s growth. Contemplation is adventure into discovery; reality. What is called “creation,” imaginative transformation, fantasy, invention, is only based on reality. Poetic description a half-truth? Can anything produced by man be called “creation?”
Richardson, asserted Louise Bogan, “is not recounting it to us retrospectively; she is sharing it with us in a kind of continuous present. Not this is the way it was, but this is the way it is.” And it is this quality that makes Pilgrimage vibrant and enthralling reading even a hundred years after it was written.
And so, in reading Pilgrimage, we set out on Dorothy Richardson’s voyage to discovery her own reality. There is no better synopsis that the one provided by Bogan in her review of the 1967 J. M. Dent complete edition:
[W]e finally have Richardson through “Miriam” complete: the brave, if not entirely fearless (for she is often racked by fear), little wrong-headed-to-the-majority partisan of her own sex (and of living as experienced by her own sex), in her high-necked blouse and (before she took up cycling) long skirt, from which the dust and mud of the London streets must be brushed daily; working endless hours in poor light at a job which involved physical drudgery as well as endless tact; going home to a tiny room under the roof of a badly run boardinghouse; meeting, in spite of her handicapped position, an astonishing range of human beings and of points of view; going to lectures; keeping up her music and languages; listening to debates at the Fabian Society; daring to go into a restaurant late at night, driven by cold and exhaustion, to order a roll, butter, and a cup of cocoa; trying to write, learning to write; trying to love and yet remain free; vividly aware of life and London. And continually sensing transition, welcoming change, eager to bring on the future and be involved with “the new.” And reiterating (on the verge of the most terrible war in history, wherein all variety of masculine madnesses were to be proven real): “Until it has been clearly explained that men are always partly wrong in their ideas, life will be full of poison and secret bitterness.”