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Dorothy M. Richardson: The Personal “Pilgrimage”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
During her lifetime Dorothy Richardson withheld all but the essential facts about herself—and gave even these grudgingly. In the years of the novelist's greatest vogue, between 1915 and 1930, when Pilgrimage was preferred by some of its readers to Proust and Joyce and was dismissed by others as unformed and insignificant, she held back the minimal biographical details which most novelists readily furnish. She listed neither place of birth nor date in Who's Who. She offered only what was known: the titles of her books and her publisher's address, and in a parenthesis her married name. It would seem that she wished to remain for her readers the author of Pilgrimage, the creator of Miriam, the historian of a woman's stream of consciousness.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
1 Louise Morgan, “How Writers Work: Dorothy Richardson” (22 October 1931), pp. 395–396, 400. In May 1929 Miss Richardson (hereafter referred to as DMR) had participated in a questionnaire conducted by the editors of The Little Review. Asked by them for the “most recent photograph” of herself, she sent one picturing an infant of not much more than a year old.
2 Pref., These Moderns: Some Parisian Close-ups by F. Ribadeau Dumas, trans. Frederic Whyte (London, 1932).
3 Subtitled “A Brief Sketch,” this appeared in Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography (second series), ed. John Gawsworth (pseud, of Terence Armstrong), pp. 195–198—hereafter cited as Sketch.
4 As early as 1920, R. Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) had attributed the American writer's Joy of Youth to the English. Her photograph was mistakenly printed as DMR's in the New York Times review of Oberland, 11 March 1928, and used by Kunitz in the 1942 volume (an abbreviated version of Authors Today and Yesterday in which he had used the Morgan picture) although by then there was available a second likeness of DMR—a portrait reproduced in Publisher's Weekly, cxxxiv (26 Nov. 1938), 1903. For Johnson's misattribution and the Times error, see “Seven Letters from Dorothy M. Richardson,” ed. Joseph Prescott, The Yale University Library Gazette, xxxiii, 3 (Jan. 1959), 106–107.
5 “Dorothy Miller Richardson,” xix (1958).
6 “Data for Spanish Publisher,” ed. Joseph Prescott, The London Magazine, vi, 6 (June 1959), 14–19—hereafter cited as Data.
7 1 was granted permission to see the Dorothy Richardson Papers by Professor Leon Edel, under whose direction my dissertation, “Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage: A Critical Study” (New York Univ., 1961), was written. I was allowed to use such material as was essential to conduct my own researches and was not permitted to quote from any of the Papers. Unless otherwise indicated, my sources are these Papers and the information and documents made available to me by DMR's sister, the late Jessie Abbot Hale (Mrs. Hale died on 25 June 1962). I wish here to thank Mrs. Odle and Mr. Arthur Batchelor, DMR's nephew, for their help.
8 J. D. Beresford, quoted in Authors Today and Yesterday, ed. Stanley J. Kunitz (New York, 1933), p. 563.
9 Information about the background and movements of DMR's family was obtained from county registers and directories with the help of Mr. Peter Walne, M. A., County Archivist of Berkshire, and from Somerset House, London.
10 Sketch, p. 195. DMR named only Berkshire in this sketch and Abingdon in a single unpublished letter. She also said, in Sketch and Data, that she had left Berkshire at the age of six.
11 DMR always referred to her father's family as Puritans, and her mother's as landed gentry. She was to give this background to the heroine of Pilgrimage.
12 DMR, “What's in a Name?” Adelphi, ii, 7 (Dec. 1924), 608.
13 DMR—reproducing with exactitude in her novel the atmosphere of her Putney home, down to the “pet” names she and her younger sister gave to each other—was to place the heroine of Pilgrimage in Barnes which lies adjacent to Putney and where indeed the Richardson girls spent many recreative hours. She also referred in her letters to Barnes rather than Putney when speaking of this period of her life.
14 Charles Richardson is not listed as a member in the records of the Constitutional Club.
15 Information supplied by Miss A. L. Reeve, Assistant Archivist of the London County Record Office.
16 Guide to Hanover (Hanover, 1905), pp. 1–12.
17 The second and third parts of Pilgrimage—Backwater and Honeycomb—deal with the experiences of these years, culminating in the suicide at Brighton of Miriam Henderson's mother. This last section of Honeycomb was added by DMR after the volume had presumably been finished (un-pub. letter, DMR to Curtis Brown, 25 July 1917).
18 Charles Richardson died at Long Ditton where he had moved with his daughter Kate and her family in 1905. I have not been able to ascertain the precise date of his death.
19 Badcock became a well-known figure in dentistry, as references to him in The Dental Record (1912–25) show. He invented an expansion plate which bore his name, delivered papers to meetings of the British Dental Association, and presided over the Orthodontic group at the Sixth International Dental Congress in 1919. He retired from his Harley Street practice in 1937. Throughout her letters, DMR referred to him as Hancock, the name of the dentist for whom her heroine worked in Wimpole Street; indeed the fictional names which she gave to people in her life occur in the letters more regularly than their actual names.
20 Rector of St. John's and Canon of Westminster from 1894 to 1900; afterwards Archdeacon of Westminster. See George Russell, Basil Wilberforce: A Memoir (London, 1918) and Constance Maud, Sparks Among the Stubble (London, 1924), pp. 7–40.
21 Lecturer at Trinity College from 1897 to 1923. See G. Lowes Dickinson, /. McT, E. McTaggart (Cambridge, Eng., 1931), and Pilgrimage (New York, 1938), iii, 156–164. All references hereafter are to this edition.
22 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York, 1934), pp. 298–299, 471.
23 Vincent Brome, H. G. Wells: A Biography (London, 1951), p. 48.
24 [H. G. Wells], “Mr. Barrie's New Book,” The Saturday Review (14 Nov. 1896), p. 526, as quoted in Gordon N. Ray, ed. The History of Mr. Polly (New York, 1960), p. x.
25 Experiment in Autobiography, pp. 545–546; Brome, p. 73.
26 Experiment, p. 209; Edward R. Pease, History of the Fabian Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1926), p. 164.
27 DMR, “Yeats of Bloomsbury,” Life and Letters Today, xxi, 20 (April 1939), 60–66; Frederick Sinclair, “A Poet's World in Wobum Walk,” St. Pancras Journal, ii, 7 (Dec. 1948), 124–127; Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (New York, 1943), pp. 132–133.
28 Daniel is referred to by Sir Stanley Unwin in The Truth About a Publisher: An Autobiographical Record (New York, 1960), p. 138. Sir Stanley recalls that in 1916 or 1917 his own firm had rejected the manuscript of a novel which dealt with homosexuality and conscientious objectors. The author of the novel was advised that Charles Daniel would probably be the only publisher who might consider handling the work.
29 Mrs. Boole's Collected Works (ed. E. M. Cobham) were published in 1931 by C. W. Daniel Co. She was 74 in 1906 when DMR met her, and she would live until 1916. According to the editor of her books and papers, she had devoted much attention in her later years “to the recall and interpretation of memories of her childhood” and to “scientific observation of the oncoming of physical infirmity” (p. xviii). These are subjects in which DMR would reveal a great interest, and she would refer directly to Mrs. Boole in Pilgrimage (iii, 371). She would also portray the Daniels as George and Cora Taylor (iii, 372–375).
30 “Notes About a Book Purporting to be About Christianity and Socialism” (June 1907), p. 315.
31 “The Open Road” (Sept. 1907), p. 153. Two reviews were written after this essay.
32 “Dans La Bise” (14 Jan. 1911); “Gruyeres” (18 Feb. 1911); “En Pays de Vaud.” For a listing of DMR's sketches, and her other periodical publications, see “Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage: A Critical Study,” pp. 349–363.
33 “A Plea for a Statistical Bureau,” The Dental Record, xxxv, 6 (1 June 1915), p. 403.
34 “Dental Legislation at Geneva,” ibid., xxxvii, 4 (1 April 1917), p. 162.
35 Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole (New York, 1952), p. 90.
36 Consumption Doomed and Some Popular Foodstuffs Exposed by Dr. Paul Carton (London, 1913); Man's Best Food by Prof. Dr. Gustav Kruger (London, 1914); The Quakers Past and Present (London, 1914); Gleanings from the Works of George Fox (London, 1914).
37 iii, 142–143; unpub.letter, DMR to Henry Savage (undated).
38 Introd.Pointed Roofs, p. vii.
39 David Garnett, The Golden Echo (London, 1953), p. 237.
40 Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and C. F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine (Princeton, 1946), p. 246; The Gypsy, I, 1 (May 1915), 5–6.
41 Henry Savage, The Receding Shore (London, 1933), pp. 123–124. In signing his work, Odle alternated between spelling his name Allan and Alan. In his marriage certificate it is spelled Alan.
42 DMR's handwriting became larger and more sprawling in her later years. At this time, however, it was strikingly medieval in appearance, with each stroke meticulously formed and embellished.
43 See Pilgrimage, I, 333, for a description of Miriam's relationship with her students which recalls this arrangement. It is interesting to note also that DMR considered the single obstructive feature of a Quaker meeting to be the position of the “elders” on the platform (unpub. letter, DMR to Ruth Suckow, 10 Sept. 1949).
44 Pall Mall Gazette (20 Jan. 1921), p. 7.
45 Knopf had begun to publish volumes of Pilgrimage in 1916. DMR negotiated with him through the agency of Curtis Brown.
46 “The Status of Illustrative Art,” Adelphi, iii, 1 (June 1925), 54–57. The other three artists were John Austen, Harry Clarke, and Austin Spare.
47 “Talkies, Plays and Books: Thoughts on the Approaching Battle Between the Spoken Pictures, Literature and the Stage,” Vanity Fair (New York), xxxii, 6 (Aug. 1929), 56.
48 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, The Little Magazine, p. 266. The Golden Hind appeared as an elaborate illustrated quarterly between Oct. 1922 and July 1924. One of its editors was Austin Spare.
49 All of DMR's many translations and contributions to various periodicals have not yet been identified. It is possible that a number of the abstracts in The Denial Record of French and German books and articles on dentistry were the work of the novelist. Attempting to substantiate this, I was notified by Mr. Leslie Godden, former editor of The Dental Record, that its editorial files for the period prior to the Second World War are no longer in existence.
50 Townley Searle was a dealer in rare books, a publisher, the author of a Chinese cook book, a bibliography of the works of Sir William S. Gilbert, and a ‘novel-drama’ in three acts: Peace in our Time (London: Collectors Club,1947). Crosland was a poet and “pamphleteer.” One of his polemical books, Lovely Woman (London, 1903), brought widespread protests from women readers for its elaboration of the opinion that women were “out of hand to an almost irremediable extent.” The book ultimately sold more than 100,000 copies. It appears in Pilgrimage, iii, SO. See W. Sorley Brown, The Life and Genius of T. W. H. Crosland (London, 1928), pp. 123–127.
51 William Macmillan, The Reluctant Healer: A Remarkable Autobiography (New York, 1952), p. 64. Macmillan lived for a while near the Odles in St. John's Wood, and also visited them in Cornwall at intervals throughout the years.
52 Brome, H. G. Wells, p. 145. Wells remained in Essex until after the death of his wife in 1927.
53 The March of Literature (London, 1939), p. 848.
54 Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1954), p. 167.
55 See Bryher's memoirs, The Heart to Artemis (New York, 1962).
56 DMR's articles for Close Up appeared from July 1927 to June 1933, a period spanning the life of the magazine. Her attraction to the cinema is apparent in Oberland, the most pictorial of her volumes and the one in which she displayed her clear grasp of cinematic techniques.
57 The DuBarry by Karl Von Schumacher (London, 1932); Mammon by Robert Neumann (London, 1933); Jews in Germany by Joseph Kastein (London, 1934); Andri Gide: His Life and His Work by Leon Pierre-Quint (London and New York, 1934); Silent Hours by Robert de Traz (London, 1934). The one novel among the group was Neumann's Die Macht—a sprawling, naturalistic work. At the request of both author and publisher DMR had undertaken—because she needed the money—the double labor of translating and condensing Neumann's novel. She shortened the text by more than the agreed 50,000 words. Neumann took offense when he saw the printed version. His complaint to the publisher, Peter Da vies, resulted in the “scrapping” of the entire edition save for those copies circulated in advance. See “Seven Letters from Dorothy M. Richardson,” p. 102. I am grateful to Prof. Joseph Prescott for microfilm of his copy of Mammon.
58 She had wished, earlier, to translate Le Temps retrouvi, the final volume of A La Recherche du temps perdu, and corresponded with the firm of Chatto and Windus before Stephen Hudson (Sydney Schiff) was chosen to be the translator. Time Regained had appeared in 1931.
59 This volume, Clear Horizon, was published by J. M. Dent, with whom DMR had signed a contract in the spring of 1935.
60 The brochure, entitled “Pilgrimage: The Life Work of Dorothy Richardson,” contained an “Essay in Estimation” by Richard Church and the quoted remarks of Beresford, Wells, May Sinclair, and others. Church spoke of DMR's novel as a “serial fiction reflecting the figures of her own world as they moved through the years” (p. 3) and as “a single work of art” (p. 10) which had finally been made available to readers in a uniform edition. I am indebted to Prof. Prescott for a copy of this brochure.
61 Publisher's Weekly, cxxxiv (26 Nov. 1938), 1903.
62 Kate Batchelor died in 1941. Mrs. Hale had been living in Texas with her husband and daughter since shortly before the First World War. The third sister, Alice, had married a French citizen and moved to his country. She lived there, however, only a few years—until her early death in 1910.
63 DMR prepared at this time a notebook labelled “Data for Alan,” in which she enclosed instructions for him concerning rebates, annuities, tax vouchers, and income tax returns. She was then receiving between £6 and £7 annually as royalties from the sales of Pilgrimage.
64 The Odles had also duplicated their London rooms in Switzerland. See Bryher, The Heart to Artemis, p. 239.
65 The first three sections of this new volume were published as “Work in Progress,” Life and Letters, XLIX, 104 (April 1946), 20–14; XLIX, 105 (May 1946), 99–114; Li, 111 (Nov. 1946), 79–88. For a description and analysis of the typescript left among DMR's papers, see “Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage,” pp. 256–269.
66 “Excursion,” English Story: Sixth Series (1945), pp. 107–112; “Visitor,” Life and Letters, XLVI, 97 (Sept. 1945), 167–172; “Visit,” ibid., pp. 173–181. These three stories constitute an autobiography in miniature, ancillary to Pilgrimage
67 Allinson, a friend of Alan Odle, had painted a portrait of him which hung in the Cafe' Royal and was reproduced in Everyman (22 Oct. 1931).
68 Those in The Evening Chronicle (Newcastle-on-Tyne), The Daily Telegraph (London), The Bristol Evening Post, The Daily Sketch (London), and The Evening News (London).
69 See, for example, Pilgrimage, in, 50; DMR, “Women in the Arts: Some Notes on the Eternally Conflicting Demands of Humanity and Art,” Vanity Fair (New York), xxiv, 3 (May 1925), 47, 100.
70 Her innovating role in the subjective novel was described, after a long period of neglect, by Leon Edel in The Modern Psychological Novel (orig. pub. The Psychological Novel: 1900–1950; New York, 1955), New York, 1960. See also his obituary notice of DMR in Modern Fiction Studies, iv (1958), 165–168.
71 I am grateful to the American Association of University Women for a National Fellowship (1959–60) enabling me to conduct the research from which this article has derived.