Dorothy Richardson is one of the major novelists of the twentieth century, comparable in stature to Proust, Joyce, and Woolf. She was reputed to have influenced more writers in her heyday than any other author. Yet by the time of her death in the late 1950s she had been largely forgotten. Her life's work, a thirteen-volume sequence of a novel, Pilgrimage, had been all but lost. Now times have changed. With its republication by Virago in four volumes, and a growing critical interest, Richardson's novel is offering a challenge to the clubbish confines of literary modernism, and finding new readers.

This book is an exploration of Richardson's extraordinary novel. It does not read the writer's life into her work, since her biographer, Gloria Fromm, has already suggested how this might be done. Rather it looks at how Pilgrimage's representation of a life of a woman from the 1890s to the time of the First World War becomes a measure of a much wider issue: the experience of modernity itself. Like Proust's great novel, Pilgrimage goes in search of lost time: but it does so in order to reveal dimensions of the historical phenomenon of women's experience, suddenly broken out from the restraint of tradition as ‘something new – a kind of different world’. As such the novel continues to speak to the contemporary reader, offering a form of cultural memory of a difficult coming-to-consciousness, a struggle over gendered meanings and identities which is no less contested today.

Why do works like Pilgrimage disappear? In some ways their rough ride through time is a revealing statement about the interaction of all literary texts with any given moment. For me, though, Richardson's novel is a rather special case, because it is a text that dares to be unfinished in a radical sense: it aims to make its aesthetic experiment answerable, open, to the social conditions in which a woman finds herself, in ways that aestheticist high modernism found difficult to countenance.