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Pilgrimage #13
March Moonlight
The thirteen magnificent novels that comprise Pilgrimage are the first expression in English of what it is to be called 'stream of consciousness' technique, predating the work of both Joyce and Woolf, echoing that of Proust with whom Dorothy Richardson stands as one of the great innovatory figures of our time. These four volumes record in detail the life of Miriam Henderson. Through her experience - personal, spiritual, intellectual - Dorothy Richardson explores intensely what it means to be a woman, presenting feminine consciousness with a new voice, a new identity.
- GenresClassics
132 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1967
35 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy M. Richardson
72Ìýbooks62ÌýfollowersDorothy Miller Richardson
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. 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 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 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. H. G. Wells (1866�1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. 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, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 � a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. 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. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter� of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman�, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ group on her that can be found here: /group/show/...
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. 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 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 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. H. G. Wells (1866�1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. 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, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 � a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. 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. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter� of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman�, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ group on her that can be found here: /group/show/...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 25, 2015
This is the last of the Pilgrimage novels; a journey I started nearly a year ago. I will miss Miriam and her comings and goings; they’ve become very much part of my life.
This last novel in the series was published posthumously in 1967 and it is unfinished. It is probably only two-thirds complete if the length of the other novels is anything to go by and only the first three chapters have been revised by Richardson. This is obvious as the last parts are a little disjointed. But the sense of it all is there and a full circle is achieved; it is 1915 and Miriam has come to the point where she is to start her own autobiographical writings; in fact to start Pilgrimage! The ending is a beginning.
March Moonlight starts with another holiday, his time in Vaud and contains several more of Miriam’s close relationships juxtaposed with each other. Starting in chapter one with Jean. Miriam also considers spirituality, Quakerism and through Jean Anglo-Catholicism. Writing now becomes work for Miriam and there are various nods towards Woolf’s A Room of one’s Own. There is a foreshadowing of the debate within 1970s feminism about whether withdrawing to what might be seen as the traditional feminine realm of the inner spirit could be seen as reactionary; whereas, it has been argued that in Pilgrimage there is more a reclamation of this space. Pilgrimage is also a journey through modernism, being written over such a long period.
Miriam’s friendship with Jean has generated analysis of friendship; starting with the Aristotelian conceptions as progressed by Derrida, but using a feminine conception rather than the all masculine one conceived by Aristotle. Although for Miriam friendship reaches it pinnacle with Jean.
Pilgrimage is a great series of novels and deserves recognition alongside Proust, Joyce and Woolf. And if Lawrence disliked it;
“Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?� asks every character in Mr Joyce or Miss Richardson or Monsieur Proust�
Then it has to be good. The time span it covers, the early 1890s to 1915, means that it is also a fin de siècle novel and covers the period of Edwardian optimism and high imperialism as well as a time of social ferment.
It’s quite a hefty read, but well worth the effort.
This last novel in the series was published posthumously in 1967 and it is unfinished. It is probably only two-thirds complete if the length of the other novels is anything to go by and only the first three chapters have been revised by Richardson. This is obvious as the last parts are a little disjointed. But the sense of it all is there and a full circle is achieved; it is 1915 and Miriam has come to the point where she is to start her own autobiographical writings; in fact to start Pilgrimage! The ending is a beginning.
March Moonlight starts with another holiday, his time in Vaud and contains several more of Miriam’s close relationships juxtaposed with each other. Starting in chapter one with Jean. Miriam also considers spirituality, Quakerism and through Jean Anglo-Catholicism. Writing now becomes work for Miriam and there are various nods towards Woolf’s A Room of one’s Own. There is a foreshadowing of the debate within 1970s feminism about whether withdrawing to what might be seen as the traditional feminine realm of the inner spirit could be seen as reactionary; whereas, it has been argued that in Pilgrimage there is more a reclamation of this space. Pilgrimage is also a journey through modernism, being written over such a long period.
Miriam’s friendship with Jean has generated analysis of friendship; starting with the Aristotelian conceptions as progressed by Derrida, but using a feminine conception rather than the all masculine one conceived by Aristotle. Although for Miriam friendship reaches it pinnacle with Jean.
Pilgrimage is a great series of novels and deserves recognition alongside Proust, Joyce and Woolf. And if Lawrence disliked it;
“Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?� asks every character in Mr Joyce or Miss Richardson or Monsieur Proust�
Then it has to be good. The time span it covers, the early 1890s to 1915, means that it is also a fin de siècle novel and covers the period of Edwardian optimism and high imperialism as well as a time of social ferment.
It’s quite a hefty read, but well worth the effort.
December 30, 2016
'Dimple HIll' was the last book that Dorothy Richardson completed, but the beginnings of another book named ‘March Moonlight� emerged when ‘Pilgrimage� was reissued in 1967, ten years after the death of its author.
This final book is a patchwork, tacked together from pieces that suggest that there could have been more books if Dorothy Richardson been given a longer and less difficult life.
There is:
•The overseas trip set up at the end of the last book, where Miriam is entangled in complex relationships with a number of people who I am sure haven’t been mentioned before and it felt strange to meet so close to the end.
•A visit to her sister Sally’s suburban home. I had quite forgotten that Miriam had another sister, and I think she might have forgotten too, but she enjoys her visit and being part of family life for a while.
•A visit to Michael and Amabel, who were struggling with the practical realities of married life. I was astonished when Miriam offered sensible advice and then retreated.
•A return to Dimple Hill, where Miriam makes worse mistakes than she did before and there is a permanent parting of the ways.
•A final return to London where Miriam finds new lodgings, meets old and new friends, and comes to realise that she has made her choice to be alone, to write, and to live on the little money she has. That’s not a firm conclusion, but it is an idea that emerges.
There is much incident but little character development.
But this final book is so clearly unfinished and unpolished; and maybe not a book at all but a collection of sketches and possibilities for books that would never be written.
One sentence on the last page caught my eye.
“Until the autumn of 2015�
I’m inclined to thank that is when this series of book should have ended; when the first volume of this series of books was published.
I wish that she had been given the time to get there, or that she had done things a little differently to get there quicker.
But she made her choices about how to live and how to write, for better or for worse.
Miriam Henderson has been infuriating at times but she has been utterly believable, and the portrayal of her consciousness has been like nothing else I have ever read.
I’ve run out of things to say about her but I shall miss her.
I plan to read more about Dorothy Richardson next year, because I want to understand her and her alter ego a little better.
This final book is a patchwork, tacked together from pieces that suggest that there could have been more books if Dorothy Richardson been given a longer and less difficult life.
There is:
•The overseas trip set up at the end of the last book, where Miriam is entangled in complex relationships with a number of people who I am sure haven’t been mentioned before and it felt strange to meet so close to the end.
•A visit to her sister Sally’s suburban home. I had quite forgotten that Miriam had another sister, and I think she might have forgotten too, but she enjoys her visit and being part of family life for a while.
•A visit to Michael and Amabel, who were struggling with the practical realities of married life. I was astonished when Miriam offered sensible advice and then retreated.
•A return to Dimple Hill, where Miriam makes worse mistakes than she did before and there is a permanent parting of the ways.
•A final return to London where Miriam finds new lodgings, meets old and new friends, and comes to realise that she has made her choice to be alone, to write, and to live on the little money she has. That’s not a firm conclusion, but it is an idea that emerges.
There is much incident but little character development.
But this final book is so clearly unfinished and unpolished; and maybe not a book at all but a collection of sketches and possibilities for books that would never be written.
One sentence on the last page caught my eye.
“Until the autumn of 2015�
I’m inclined to thank that is when this series of book should have ended; when the first volume of this series of books was published.
I wish that she had been given the time to get there, or that she had done things a little differently to get there quicker.
But she made her choices about how to live and how to write, for better or for worse.
Miriam Henderson has been infuriating at times but she has been utterly believable, and the portrayal of her consciousness has been like nothing else I have ever read.
I’ve run out of things to say about her but I shall miss her.
I plan to read more about Dorothy Richardson next year, because I want to understand her and her alter ego a little better.
January 17, 2023
And thus ends Pilgrimage - farewell Miriam
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
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