Each generation experiences itself as a break away from the traditions that have preceded it. For the generation coming of age during the First World War, the necessity of this modernist gesture must have been of a different order. This was a generation that was to be ‘lost’ and traumatized on the field of battle, that was witness to sudden transformations in the roles of the sexes and the reward of the women's vote, in an age that had already begun to valorize the new. It was a generation too that would see itself moving on film, in a world prepared to re-stage wars and revolutions for the camera. Subject to the demands of a rapidly changing and uncertain environment and yet to the equally shocking stasis, arrestation, of wartime: how was such a generation to define itself except through negation, against the certainties of a time it could barely remember? The writer Winifred Bryher, remembering 1916:

Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage, was not of this generation. Born in 1873 to a family who aspired to the genteel life-style of the Home Counties English middle class, she had been educated to expect the leisure and security of her status, and to use her mind. Her own break with late-Victorian tradition had come rather abruptly with the bankruptcy of her father in the 1890s, when she had found independent employment for herself in central London. By the time of the publication of the first volume – the first of thirteen – of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs, in 1915, Dorothy Richardson was already in her early forties, and the author of a number of journalistic articles aswell as an accomplished translator.