‘Aren't you glad you are alive today, when all these things are happening?’ (ii. 149). Miriam Henderson is referring to the newfound pleasures available to women, such as bicycle-riding. New mobilities, new freedoms. Through the eyes of its central protagonist, Pilgrimage explores what it meant to be a ‘new woman’ in the turn-of-the-century years, breaking away from familial ties, as we have seen, towards an awareness of herself as ‘something new – a kind of different world’. The novel thus sketches the profile of what we might term a generational ‘structure of feeling’. Miriam is located in a particular historical moment, as in some sense ‘typical’ of her sex and her class, living ‘the ordinary average life of hundreds’, in Bryher's words. She exists for the reader, in a Humean sense, as a bundle of signs and impressions – inhabiting a range of references and actions strewn throughout the text which testify to its historical specificity. For the woman reader of the time, the tracing of Miriam's profile may have produced a shock of self-recognition.

Some of these clues remain easily identifiable, and are characteristic of the new-woman fiction of the period. Miriam's taste for reading Ibsen and Zola immediately marks her, as does her love for smoking cigarettes in public, her thoughts on marriage, on free love, and on riding a bicycle without a corset.

Rather more difficult to retrieve without a full-blown critical archaeology of the text is her place as a new woman within the intellectual and political milieu of the day. We are often presented with half-worked encounters with ideas, fragments of quotations, isolated moments of argumentative exchange, name-dropping, and lists of texts. We range through a narrative rich in allusions to science, philosophy, art, and religion. We visit public lectures where the focus is more on the audience reaction or Miriam's day-dreaming than on the subject-matter of Dante or the photographic process.

Moreover, Miriam's own self-analysis, whether concerning her identity or her political stance, is not always consistent or reliable. At times she appears to try on ideas and labels – the range of cultural signs at her disposal – as if to discover the best ‘fit’.