The fourth volume of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, 1919's The Tunnel, found an ambivalent reader in her contemporary, Katherine Mansfield. In a review of Richardson's fourth ‘chapter-novel’, Mansfield wrote,

The implied criticism here – that Richardson is too enamoured of her own mind – has haunted Pilgrimage since the first volume was published a century ago. Mansfield's view of Richardson here highlights a significant difference in the way each writer treats fellow feeling in her respective fiction. While impressed with Richardson's technical skill, Mansfield is bored by the primary literary contribution of Pilgrimage – its singular focus on a unique conscious mind with whom the reader can think and feel over a sustained period. Throughout her own short but fruitful career, Mansfield produced hundreds of fictional minds whose rich interior lives are revealed to us but briefly.

The way Mansfield's thought proliferated into this vast crowd of characters would seem to align her work with Michael Tratner's central thesis in Modernism and Mass Politics. Modernism, he argues, was not a retreat into solipsism or introspection, but rather ‘an effort to escape the limits of nineteenth-century individualist conventions and write about distinctly “collectivist” phenomena’ (Tratner 1995: 3). During her short life Mansfield produced no massive novels – no Dorothea Brookes or Isabel Archers. In that sense, her work certainly makes a cleaner break with the realist past than Richardson's does. Stephen Kern, who allows for multiple understandings of distinctly modernist narrative, also insists that we ought not to equate modernism with the kind of individualised worldview we have seen in Richardson's work. He argues, ‘[w]hile singular focalization narrowed and sharpened vision, other innovative focalizations expanded and varied it’ (Kern 2011: 183).