Dorothy Richardson

Biography

Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873, the third of four daughters. After the fourth daughter was born her father began referring to Dorothy as his son. Richardson "also attributed this habit to her own boylike willfulness. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. In London she "attended a progressive school influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin", and where "the pupils were encouraged to think for themselves". Here she "studied French, German, literature, logic and psychology". At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Hanover, Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.

Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to an attic room, 7 Endesleigh Street, Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. In 1904 she took a holiday in the Bernese Oberland, financed by one of the dentists, which was the source for her novel Oberland. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. Wells was married to a former schoolmate of Richardson's. On leave from work she stayed in Pevensey, Sussex and went to Switzerland for the winter. Then she resigned from her Harley Street job and left London "to spend the next few years in Sussex ... on a farm run by a Quaker family". Richardson's interest in the Quakers led to her writing The Quakers Past and Present and editing an anthology Gleanings from the Works of George Fox, which were both published in 1914. She spent much of 1912 in Cornwall, and then in 1913 rented a room in St John's Wood, London, though she also lived in Cornwall.

While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, and as well as she translated during her life eight books into English from French and German. The subjects of Richardson's book reviews and early essays range "for Whitman and Nietzsche to French philosophy and British politics" demonstrating both "the range of her interests and the sharpness of her mind". Starting in 1908 Richardson regularly wrote short prose essays, "sketches" for the Saturday Review, and around 1912 "a reviewer urged her to try writing a novel". She began writing Pointed Roofs, in the autumn of 1912, while staying with J. D. Beresford and his wife in Cornwall, and it was published in 1915.

She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, associated with an artistic circle that included Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, and Wyndham Lewis. He was fifteen years younger than her, tubercular and an alcoholic, and was not expected to live long. However, he stopped drinking and lived until 1948. Odle was very thin and "over six feet tall with waist-length hair wound around the outside of his head", which he never cut. He also rarely cut his finger nails. From 1917 until 1939, the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London; and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years, as Alan made little money from his art.

Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up, with which her close friend Bryher was involved.

In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died in 1957. The last chapters (books) of Pilgrimage, published during Richardson's lifetime, were Clear Horizon in 1935 and Dimple Hill with the 1938 Collected Edition. This Collected Edition was poorly received and Richardson only published, during the rest of her life, three chapters of another volume in 1946, as work in "Work in Progress," in Life and Letters.

The final chapter (13th book) of Pilgrimage, March Moonlight, was not published until 1967, where it forms the conclusion to Volume IV of the Collected Edition; though the first three chapters had appeared as "Work in Progress," Life and Letters, 1946. This novel is incomplete. Apparently because of the poor sales and disappointing reception of the Collected Edition of 1938, she lost heart. She was 65 in 1938.

Stream of consciousness

In a review of Pointed Roofs (The Egoist April 1918), May Sinclair first applied the term "stream of consciousness" in her discussion of Richardson's stylistic innovations. Pointed Roofs was the first volume in a sequence of 13 novels titled Pilgrimage, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. The term was coined by William James in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. In a letter to the bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach in 1934, Richardson comments that "Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & D.R. ... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously".

Richardson hated the term, calling it in 1949 "that lamentably meaningless metaphor 'The Shroud of Consciousness' borrowed ... by May Sinclair from the epistemologists, ... to describe my work, & still, in Lit. criticism. pushing its inane career".

Pilgrimage

Miriam Henderson, the central character in the Pilgrimage novel sequence, is based on author's own life between 1891 and 1915. Richardson, however, saw Pilgrimage as one novel for which each of the individual volumes were "chapters". Pilgrimage was read as a work of fiction and "its critics did not suspect that its content was a reshaping of DMR's own experience", nor that that it was a roman à clef.

Feminist writer

Richardson is also an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. She records that when she began writing, "attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism", and after setting aside "a considerable mass of manuscript" finding "a fresh pathway". Her wariness of the conventions of language, her bending of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are used to create a feminine prose, which Richardson saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. Virginia Woolf in 1923 noted, that Richardson "has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." In her 1938 "Foreword" to the Collected Edition of Pilgrimage Richardson responded to criticism of her writing, "for being unpunctuated and therefore unreadable", arguing that "Feminine prose, as Charles Dickens and James Joyce show themselves to be aware, should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstruction".

John Cowper Powys, writing in 1931, saw Richardson as a "pioneer in a completely new direction" because she has created in her protagonist Miriam the first woman character who embodies the female "quest for the essence of human experience". Powys contrast Richardson with other women novelists, such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf whom he sees as betraying their deepest feminine instincts by using "as their medium of research not these instincts but the rationalistic methods of men". Likewise in 1975 Sydney Janet Kaplan describes Pilgrimage as "conceived in revolt against the established tradition of fiction. ... [Richardson's] writing marks a revolution in perspective, a shift from a 'masculine' to a 'feminine' method of exposition".

London novelist

After first working as a governess in Germany and then England, early in her life Richardson "lived in a Bloomsbury attic ... [and] London became her great adventure]]. And although Pointed Roofs focuses on Miriam's experience as a governess in Germany, much of Pilgrimage is set in London. London "is an ‘elastic’ material space that facilitates Miriam’s public life. London’s streets, cafés, restaurants and clubs figure largely in her explorations, which extend her knowledge of both the city and herself". John Cowper Powys in his 1931 study of Richardson, describes her as London's William Wordsworth, who instead of "the mystery of mountains and lakes" gives us "the mystery of roof-tops and pavements".

Reputation

Rebecca Bowler wrote in August 2015: "Given Richardson’s importance to the development of the English novel, her subsequent neglect is extraordinary". The first few of her novels books "were received with rapturous enthusiasm and occasional confusion", but by the 1930s interest had declined–despite John Cowper Powys championing her in his short critical study Dorothy M. Richardson (1931). In 1928 Conrad Aiken, in a review of ‘‘Oberland’’ had attempted to explain why she was so "curiously little known," and offered the following reasons: her "minute recording" which tires those who want action; her choice of a woman's mind as center; and her heroine's lack of "charm." By 1938 "she was sufficiently obscure for Ford Madox Ford to bewail the 'amazing phenomenon' of her 'complete world neglect' ".

However, Richardson changed publishers and Dent & Cresset Press published a new Collected Edition of Pilgrimage in 1938. This was republished by Virago Press "in the late 1970s, in its admirable but temporary repopularisation of Richardson". in 1976 in America a 4 vols. Popular Library (New York), edition appeared. Now scholars are once again reclaiming her work and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England is supporting the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project, with the aim of publishing a collected edition of Richardson's works and letters. Pointed Roofs was translated into Japanese in 1934, French in 1965 and German in 1993. There were subsequent French translations of Backwater, 1992 and Deadlock, 1993.

A blue plaque was unveiled, in May 2015, at Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where Richardson lived, in 1905 and 1906, opposite W. B. Yeats, and The Guardian comments that "people are starting to read her once more, again reasserting her place in the canon of experimental modernist prose writers".