Dorothy M. Richardson
On May 17, 1873,
an extraordinary woman who would go on to become an extraordinary writer was born.
Dorothy Richardson began work on
Pilgrimage,
her life-long experimental novel, around 1915, about the same time that Joyce, Proust, and Woolf were
conducting similar literary experiments. She was the first writer to work in
what came to be called "stream of consciousness." Virginia Woolf
credited her with the invention of something that Woolf herself would go on
to make famous, "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender."
Pilgrimage is
an autobiographical work, covering twenty-five years of
Richardson's remarkable and moving life. Living alone in poverty and
near-isolation, she set out to find a literary style with which to tell the
story of a young woman coming into possession of herself while painstakingly
avoiding the fluffery of "the romantic and realist novel alike."
Born into impoverished gentility, from the age of
seventeen Richardson was forced to earn her own living. She worked for a while as
a tutor-governess, first in Hanover and then in London. Finally, she
took a position in an English country house.
Richardson's mother committed suicide in
1895, and that led to the breakup of the family. Richardson moved back to
London and went to work Harley Street as a secretary/assistant to a
dentist.
While in London,
she began moving among avant garde
Socialist and artistic circles, including the Bloomsbury set. She
began publishing translations and working as a freelance journalist and
eventually gave up her secretarial job. In 1917, she married artist
Alan Odel. Odel was years younger than she and was a distinctly
Bohemian figure, with his waist-length hair wound around his head.
Until his death in 1948, he spent the winters with his wife in Cornwall and
the summers in London.
Throughout her career, Richardson published large numbers of essays,
poems, short stories, sketches, and journalistic pieces. But her
reputation as a writer rests firmly on her Pilgrimage
sequence. The first of the works in the group, Pointed Roofs (1915),
was the first book in English to explore stream of consciousness. The
author disliked the term as used to describe her work, preferring to call her form of writing "interior
monologues." The discovery of this technique is often credited to
Joyce and Woolf, and the failure to regard Richardson's role as pivotal to
its development is due
mostly to the critical neglect of Richardson's writing during her lifetime. The
fact that Pointed Roofs displays the writer's admiration for
German culture at a time when Britain and Germany were at war may also have
contributed to the general lack of recognition of the book's radical
importance.
Often thought of as a feminist writer, Richardson calls for equal rights for women
and affirms the importance of the feminine point-of-view as subject matter
for her books. The main character in Pilgrimage, Miriam, is a woman
in search of her own full identity, which she knows is impossible to define
in male terms of reference. To achieve the right effect, Richardson
bent the rules of punctuation nearly to breaking, and she extended sentence
length to the point of near annoyance. All that she did, she
explained, in the name of "feminine prose," which she clearly saw as necessary for the expression of
her character's
feminine experience.
She
also worked hard at removing her presence as narrator from her works. She complained about
male writers constantly injecting their voices into
their work. "Bang, bang, bang,
on they go, these men's books, like an L.C.C. tram, yet unable to make you
forget them, the authors, for a moment." She liked James' works
for their psychological depth, but she abhorred his male ego, which she
described as "a non-stop waggling of
the backside as he hands out, on a salver, sentence after sentence.... So
what? One feels, reaching the end of the drama in a resounding box, where no
star shines and no bird sings."
Richardson's goal was to develop a style that allowed
her to disappear from her work while allowing art its own "power to create, or arouse,
and call into operation...the human faculty of contemplation."
In fact, she succeeded all too well, both in her work and personally.
Although she caused an initial flurry of interest in stream of consciousness,
she just as quickly disappeared from the literary scene. Book sales lagged even behind her fame,
and she had to depend upon the kindness of friends and her own work ethics
to support herself. While Proust was independently wealthy, Joyce had rich
patrons and sponsors, and Woolf had her own publishing house, Richardson
struggled along on her own, something she did for half a century. When her one affair resulted in pregnancy
and then miscarriage, she was upset about losing the baby but happy to
give up the father, H. G. Wells.
Living in an attic on the edge of
fame was a way of life to which she seemed resigned. Two blocks away,
the Bloomsbury Group met regularly. Six blocks from there, Mary Wolstonecraft had, a century earlier, written
Vindication of the Rights of Women. Across the alley from her
flat,
she could see W. B. Yeats writing by the light of "two immensely tall, thick
white candles."
Yet, despite her influence on those who would follow in her
literary footsteps--and eventually overtake them--she seemed too preoccupied
with her writing to be very concerned about her success.
It was only when she was alone and in the intervals of quiet reading that
she came into possession of her hands. With others they oppressed her by
their size and their lack of feminine expressiveness. No one could fall in
love with such hands. Loving her, someone might come to tolerate them. They
were utterly unlike Eve's plump, white, inflexible little palms. But they
were her strength. They came between her and the world of women. They would
be her companions until the end. They would wither. But the bones would not
change. The bones would be laid, unchanged and wise, in her grave. -
from Pilgrimage
Dorothy Richardson died alone, greatly forgotten and in poverty, in
1957.
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