Dorothy richardson wiki

Dorothy Richardson ( &#; ) was the author of the pioneering modernist novel Pilgrimage. She published twelve chapter-volumes of Pilgrimage in her lifetime, and a thirteenth, March Moonlight, came out after her death.

Her work was hailed as innovative, involved, and illuminating, and her refusal to narrate anything that the main character Miriam Henderson could not perceive caused her novels to be labelled ‘stream of consciousness’, in the first application of that phrase to literature.

Miriam leaves home at seventeen, becomes a student teacher in Germany and then in London. She works as a dental secretary, reads philosophy, makes friends with Zionists and socialists, has a breakdown, has a love affair, meets famous writers and frequents cafés. The story of her life is the story of fin-de-siècle London.

Biography

by Anthony Domestico

Dorothy Richardson (), now largely ignored but once regarded as one of the most important of modernist novelists, was a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique.  Her thirteen-novel project, Pilgrimage, is a prime example of modernism at its finest and most maddening: dilatory in its pacing, challenging in its form, and concerned above all else with the faithful representation of the (oftentimes dull) whims of everyday consciousness.

Richardson was born in Abington, Oxfordshire in   Due to her family’s financial difficulties, she was forced to find employment at the age of 17, working as a governess and then later as a dental assistant.  This experience would provide fodder for Richardson’s depiction of her heroine’s ventures into the working world in Pilgrimage.

While in London working at a dental office, Richardson came into contact with a number of literary and cultural figures.  She began writing freelance for the Dental Record and other publications.  Her first two books, the The Quakers Past and Presentand the Gleanings from the Work of George Fox, were non-fictional works concerned primarily with religious history.