The Tunnel

Pilgrimage #4

by Dorothy M. Richardson

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Genres: Fiction, Classics, 20th Century

340 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1919

About the author

Dorothy Miller Richardson

Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.

Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.

In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. From 1917 until 1939 the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London, and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.

Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.

Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.

Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.

If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fourth in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series. Coincidentally I am reading another book of the same title by William Gass. This one stands well in comparison and this series gets better and better. We continue to follow the protagonist Miriam as she becomes more independent.
As ever the plot is irrelevant and mostly absent and we see life through Miriam’s eyes. By now Miriam is 21; she has taken a job as a dental assistant with Dr Hancock, a family friend. She also goes into lodgings with Mrs Bailey and makes some new women friends, Jan and Mag and also the consumptive Miss Dear. Miriam also begins to move in more interesting circles with Hypo Wilson and his friends. Hypo Wilson is a very thinly disguised H G Wells (Richardson knew him well). Miriam also falls in love with the bicycle and there are some good descriptions of discovering the freedom that cycling can bring.
Interestingly reviews from Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf were mixed and both made criticisms about structure and order, although the lack of structure didn’t really bother me.
Richardson illustrates the new phenomenon of the single working woman; Miriam hasn’t lived in the family home until marriage, but has set out on her own and relies on her own resources. Miriam increasingly comes across as an independent thinker; rejecting religion, reading modern texts and not feeling the need to have a man in her life. She opts for an independent creative space despite the problems that raises for herself and others. Miriam is beginning to fall between the world she was brought up in with its traditional expectations of marriage and domesticity and the world of work. Miriam quite consciously is on a journey of rejecting marriage and motherhood in favour of writing and her own space and company.
Miriam becomes more sceptical about men. Her experience with Dr Hancock is illustrative. They seem to have shared interests and attend lectures together and are friendly and informal. Friends of Dr Hancock point out that the relationship might be misinterpreted and he withdraws and becomes very formal. Miriam has a very amusing rant about men and the male gender. As her thoughts move and coalesce she begins to ask a basic question about the role of men and masculinity.
What is also very interesting are the details of everyday life; little descriptive passages that make the novel much more interesting. The bike ride passage is wonderfully written and amusing. Miriam herself grows more interesting and by this time the reader is becoming more attached to her; it’s a great series.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the entirety of Virginia Woolf's review from the TLS 1919 - I do not agree with her comment on the flatness of the characters, nor on the lack of plot - though she is right that there is little plot in the traditional sense:


"Although THE TUNNEL is the fourth book that Miss Richardson has written, she must still expect to find her reviewers paying a great deal of attention to her method. It is a method that demands attention, as a door whose handle we wrench ineffectively calls our attention to the fact that it is locked. There is no slipping smoothly down the accustomed channels; the first chapters provide an amusing spectacle of hasty critics seeking them in vain. If this were the result of perversity, we should think Miss Richardson more courageous than wise; but being, as we believe, not wilful but natural, it represents a genuine conviction of the discrepancy between what she has to say and the form provided by tradition for her to say it in. She is one of the rare novelists who believe that the novel is so much alive that it actually grows. As she makes her advanced critic, Mr. Wilson, remark: "There will be books with all that cut out--him and her--all that sort of thing. The book of the future will be clear of all that." And Miriam Henderson herself reflects: "but if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books knowing all about style would be to become like a man." So "him and her" are cut out, and with them goes the old deliberate business: the chapters that lead up and the chapters that lead down; the characters who are always characteristic; the scenes that are passionate and the scenes that are humorous; the elaborate construction of reality; the conception that shapes and surrounds the whole. All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated procession, and is, we are bidden to believe, the source beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell.
The critic is thus absolved from the necessity of picking out the themes of the story. The reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson's consciousness, to register one after another, and one on top of another, words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures, to follow these impressions as they flicker through Miriam's mind, waking incongruously other thoughts, and plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life. But a quotation is better than description.

"She was surprised now at her familiarity with the details of the room . . . that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that . . . all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backward to something you know is there. However far you go out you come back.... I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. They are mine."

Here we are thinking, word by word, as Miriam thinks. The method, if triumphant, should make us feel ourselves seated at the centre of another mind, and, according to the artistic gift of the writer, we should perceive in the helter-skelter of flying fragments some unity, significance, or design. That Miss Richardson gets so far as to achieve a sense of reality far greater than that produced by the ordinary means is undoubted. But, then, which reality is it, the superficial or the profound? We have to consider the quality of Miriam Henderson's consciousness, and the extent to which Miss Richardson is able to reveal it. We have to decide whether the flying helter-skelter resolves itself by degrees into a perceptible whole. When we are in a position to make up our minds we cannot deny a slight sense of disappointment. Having sacrificed not merely "hims and hers," but so many seductive graces of wit and style for the prospect of some new revelation or greater intensity, we still find ourselves distressingly near the surface. Things look much the same as ever. It is certainly a very vivid surface. The consciousness of Miriam takes the reflection of a dentist's room to perfection. Her senses of touch, sight and hearing are all excessively acute. But sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off her, unrelated and unquestioned, without shedding quite as much light as we had hoped into the hidden depths. We find ourselves in the dentist's room, in the street, in the lodging-house bedroom frequently and convincingly; but never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the reality which underlies these appearances. In particular, the figures of other people on whom Miriam casts her capricious light are vivid enough, but their sayings and doings never reach that degree of significance which we, perhaps unreasonably, expect. The old method seems sometimes the more profound and economical of the two. But it must be admitted that we are exacting. We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms. We are asking too much; but the extent of our asking proves that "The Tunnel" is better in its failure than most books in their success."

[Emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite bookseller made me buy this a few years ago and though the unappealing cover and idiotic footnotes kept me away, I have finally succumbed and so my first book of the new year is this wonderful blast of fresh air from the past.

After tea he settled back easily in his chair and went on with his stories. Miriam found it almost impossible to follow him. She grew weary of his bantering tone. It smeared over everything he touched and made him appear to be saying one thing over and over again in innuendo. Something he could not say out and could never get way from. He made little pauses and then it gleamed horrible about all his refinement of dress and bearing and Gerald laughed encouragingly and he went on, making a story that was like a play, that looked like life did when you looked at it, a maddening fussiness about nothing and people getting into states of mind… He saw her as a woman in a home, nicely dressed in a quiet drawing-room, lit by softly screened clear fresh garden daylight… What a hopeless thing a man’s consciousness was. How awful to have nothing but a man’s consciousness.

Dorothy Richardson is the great forgotten Modernist writer. This is book 4 of her thirteen-volume semi-autobiographical opus. Published in 1919 but set in 1896, it is fascinating both as an experiment in literary form, the famed stream of consciousness (a term Richardson apparently hated, but frankly I can’t think of a better one); and as an informed account of living alone as a young woman, working in an office, in the last days of the Victorian era.

Miriam Henderson is a secretary at a dental office and the proud renter of a room of her own. Throughout the book she discovers the joys and the weariness of city life, discovers feminism, meets a famous writer (a fictionalized H.G. Wells, Richardson’s lover) who will set her on the road to her own artistic career, learns to ride a bicycle, falls in love with theatre and, rather delightfully, spends a lot of time skiving and procrastinating at work. There are scenes that will ring true for any woman even today who has lived in a city: the fearful encounter with a harmless man in a dark alley, the way new friends are both exhilarating and tiring.

It’s a meandering, plotless book. It can be hard to know what’s going on. It requires attention. But the rewards are enormous. The slipstream of consciousness. Miriam skipping downstairs in her bloomers humming snatches of hymns, preparing for her first solo cycling trip in the countryside. Torrents of words, impressions, political grandstanding, the many ways of being alive, at all times. A cast of secondary characters realized unto the last detail. It is less like reading than like living. But it’s like living when you were eighteen, and alone for the first time in the metropolis, and all life was open to you, or so it sometimes seemed.

My bookseller is now making me buy the whole thirteen volumes…

[Till Raether · Rating 5 out of 5]

An explosion of proto-feminist anger, and towards the end 50 pages of pure Anita Brookner plot. In other words, just wonderful.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tunnel is the fourth volume of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage series, which follows the fascinating protagonist Miriam Henderson. This particular novel finds Miriam firmly ensconced within London, where she works as an assistant to a dentist.

The Tunnel is not the best, nor the most interesting, volume of Pilgrimage to date; indeed, at points, it feels almost static. I found myself far less interested in the external storyline than in Miriam until almost the end of the novel. Of course, it is still spectacularly written, but The Tunnel is my least favourite Richardson novel to date.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally don't give books a star review, but this one deserves it-- mostly because no one else has bothered to review it. It's a lost gem, forgotten by all but the professor of my English senior seminar. Half-impressions, missed conversations, elegant descriptions of light and dark, consciousness mosaically patterning between one idea and the next, it's all there, structured by short vignettes and impressive formalist experiments (1st person to 2nd person to 3rd person in one paragraph, anyone?). If you can imagine Agnès Varda's "Cléo de 5 à 7" as a novel, this would be about it.

[Rachel Stevenson]

Modernism is a feminist issue. The first novel in this series, published in 1915, before The Wasteland, before Ulysses, was the first to use the stream of consciousness technique; indeed, May Sinclair was the first writer to use the phrase in a literary context whilst reviewing this book. But just as people think Blur vs Oasis whenever Britpop is mentioned, ignoring the other (female, queer bands around at the time), modernism only means gloomy Eliot and horny Joyce, rather than Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, Sinclair herself. Only Woolf is allowed in as the token girl in the boys' club, whereas it could be argued (and I’m sure it has in many an undergrad dissertation) that women writers were trying to find new forms in a masculine literary world, after the turgid Victorian period.

The consciousness being streamed in this novel is that of Miriam, a young woman who's left her bourgeois home and is lodging off Euston Road, working as a dental assistant in Bloomsbury. Interesting that more books aren't written about dentists, given the Freudian image of the mouth, the fog of anaesthetic, and the fact that dentists kill themselves more than any other profession. Mirian is quite the flaneuse, falling in love with London as she wanders about it; to her, as to many other young people, it represents freedom. She learns to ride a bike, takes tea at the ABC, socialises with her friends, looks after an acquaintance who is ill, fails to meet a man. Nothing happens, yet because this is the late Victorian era, it's the story of (partial) liberation.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A character based novel about Miriam Henderson who is 21 years old and becoming fairly independent. Set in the late Victorian era in England. She works as a dentist’s secretary with Dr. Hancock, a family friend. She lodges with Mrs Bailey and has some new women friends, including Miss Dear, a consumptive who requires daily care. Miriam also mixes socially with writers and musicians. She enjoys going to the theatre and the freedom in riding a bicycle.

A novel with little plot. Miriam’s perspective is well described through stream of consciousness narration. She highlights the world from a young single woman’s viewpoint, commenting on her preference of living a single person’s life. This book is the fourth novel in the 13 book ‘Pilgrimage’ series. The series is loosely based on the author’s life.

A very worthwhile, thought provoking read of an ordinary independent young single woman living in the 1890s.

This book was first published in 1919.

[Aubrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have such conflicted feelings about this book. It's indispensable as an example of literary modernism, but on its own merits, it's just alright. While reading this I kept having whiplash going back and forth between loving the book and despising it, and I think that's the point. This is the kind of book that by nature transcends the star rating, but I gave it a 3/5 for the mixed bag it gives me.

[Samuel Maina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richardson’s form seems to be newer than it perhaps is. In this fourth book of the second volume she seems unaware of the perfection of her method. I for one got hooked up to the Pilgrimage series after reading the first instalment of the first volume “Pointed roofs”

Miriam is an acute observer you could almost feel space described by her, be it a room, people at a dinner table, the forest etc. Characters are presented in the same vivid but fragmentary way in which they appeared to Miriam, the fragmentary way it happens in life.

Dorothy M. Richardson(D.M.R) has form carried to punctilious perfection. I mean there are so many themes explored in this single volume I could write a whole book about it. One thing this has done to my reading is that I have had to slow it down to get what D.M.R was getting to; or perhaps it was me getting to DMR's personality through Miriam

When we talk about Art, method and form one thing Dorothy still amazes me at is how she projected her life through Miriam so candidly. Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close.
Look at how characters have been forged through art, method and form through this discourse – “Miriam's mother, of her sister Harriett, of the Corries and Joey Banks in Honeycomb, of the Miss Pernes and Julia Doyle, and the North London schoolgirls, in Backwater of Fraulein Pfaff and Mademoiselle, of the Martins and Emma Bergmann and Ulrica and " the Australian" in Pointed, Roofs. The mere "word-painting" is masterly. . . .” Unmistakably D.M.R

This intensity is the effect of an extreme concentration on the thing seen or felt. Miss Richardson disdains every stroke that does not tell; be it through silence, books, descriptive writing, phrases and all that mess.

I will tackle a theme that seemed resplendent through and through the book. Silence is a major theme no doubt, but in these few lines let me tackle bias.

There is a skewed view either intentionally or not about men through her writing. Miss Richardson does not mince words when trying to explain how “it’s a man’s world” To be fair, she was trying to articulate a point but while seated at one end of the table all limitations notwithstanding.

Men have been taken to the threshing floor time and time again to a point I thought about what wrongs men might have done to her. Below are the excerpts that show what I am talking about…bias as a theme…

“There is something about being Irish Roman Catholic that makes happiness.”

“Never mind, city men ; with a wisdom of their own which kept them going and did not affect anything, all alike and thinking the same thoughts ; far away from anything she thought or knew.”

" Devonshire people are all consumptive,"

“If there's any hearthrug standing it's the men who do it, smoking blissfully alone, and trying to look weary and wise and important if anyone comes in."
“I wouldn't be a man for anything. I wouldn't have a man's consciousness, for anything."

“Men are simply paltry and silly all of them.”

“Boys and girls were much the same . . . women stopped being people and went off into hideous processes. What for? What was it all for? Development. The wonders of science. The wonders of science for women are nothing but gynaecology all those frightful operations in the "British Medical Journal" and those jokes the hundred golden rules. . . . Sacred functions . . . highest possibilities. . . sacred for what ? The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world? The Future of the Race? What world? What race? Men. . . . Nothing but men; forever.”

“It will all go on as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into the world . . . even if civilized women stop the colonials and primitive races would go on. It is a nightmare.” (sic)

“There was nothing to turn to. Books were poisoned. Art. All the achievements of men were poisoned at the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity.”

“Religion in the world had nothing but insults for women. Christ was a man. If it was true that he was God taking on humanity he took on male humanity . . . and the people who explained him, St. Paul and the priests, the Anglicans and the non-Conformist was the same story everywhere. Even if religion could answer science and prove it wrong there was no hope, for women. And no intelligent person can prove science wrong. Life is poisoned, for women, at the very source.”

Thomas Henry Huxley. “But he built his life up complacently on home and family life while saying all those things about women, lived on them and their pain, ate their food, enjoyed the comforts they made . . . and wrote conceited letters to his friends about his achievements and his stomach and his feelings.”

“Men can always get away. I am going to lead a man's life always getting away. . . .”

“Women can never go very far from the protection of men because they are physically inferior.”

“A young lady, taking a bicycle ride in a daylit suburb. That was what she was. That was all he would allow. It's something in men.”

On reading a book “A man's reading was not reading; not a looking and a listening so that things came into the room. It was always an assertion of himself.”

“Perhaps that was why husbands so often took to reading to their wives, when they stayed at home at all ; to avoid being in the room listening to their condemning silences or to their speech, speech with all the saucepan and comfort thoughts simmering behind it.”

“A doctor could see nothing in marriage but children. This man saw women with a sort of admiring pity.”

As a man, I will now stop.

A good read.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fourth book of Dorothy Richardson’s ‘Pilgrimage’ gas pulled me from the first to the second of my four green Virago omnibus editions, and to starting anew at this place felt right, because there has been a sea change in the life of Miriam Henderson. After three live-in teaching positions, where she always considered home to be her family home, she has established a home of her own, in a room in a house in Bloomsbury.

A room of her own:

“She closed the door and stood just inside it looking at the room. It was smaller than her memory of it. When she had stood in the middle of the floor with Mrs Bailey, she had looked at nothing but Mrs Bailey, waiting for the moment to ask about the rent. Coming upstairs she had felt the room was hers and barely glanced at it when Mrs Bailey opened the door. From the moment of waiting on the stone steps outside the front door, everything had opened to the movement of her impulse. She was surprised now at her familiarity with the details of the room . . . that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that . . . all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here.”

She is earning her living by working in a dentist surgery, in a job that seems to bring together the roles of receptionist, bookkeeper and dental nurse. She finds her workload difficult to manage; and it is clear that she is the kind of person who worries that she has failed if she hasn’t completed every single task perfectly; but she enjoys playing her part, she takes a pride in her successes and she appreciates having a place in the team.

The scenes where Miriam is at work are particularly vividly drawn. I was caught up in every moment with Miriam; but I have to say that I am so glad that dentistry has moved on since then.

I can’t say exactly when ‘then’ was, because Miriam’s thoughts and thoughts and perceptions were all I had to guide me through this book; but I can say, because I know Dorothy Richardson’s dates and because I knew some of the books that Miriam was reading – one of which was published in 1899 – that this story must have been set in or a little after that year.

(I was delighted that Miriam loved 'Red Pottage' as I loved it too, and it was the book that I had to finish before I returned to her story a month or two ago.)

That makes her choice to live alone as a single woman and to earn her own living quire remarkable.

Reading Dorothy Richardson requires the ability to notice small things and to accept that there are some things that you many never know. I spotted a reference to Miriam’s employment having been found by a family friend, but how she found her lodgings, how she came to know her friends, I don’t know.

But to complain about that would be missing the point. This is the story of Miriam’s journey, filtered through her consciousness, and the best way to appreciate it is to stay in the moment with her. And there is so very much to appreciate.

Miriam was captivated by London.

“Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pave-ment of Endsleigh Gardens Miriam felt as fresh and un-troubled as if it were early morning. When she had got out of her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court Road she had found that the street had lost its first terrifying impression and had become part of her home. It was the borderland of the part of London she had found for herself; the part where she was going to live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week. It was all she wanted. That was why she was young and glad ; that was why fatigue had gone out of her life. There was nothing in the world that could come nearer to her than the curious half twilight half moonlight effect of lamplit Endsleigh Gardens opening out of Gower Place ; its huge high trees, their sharp shadows on the little pavement running by the side of the railings, the neighbouring gloom of the Euston Road dimly lit by lamps standing high in the middle of the roadway at long intervals, the great high quiet porched houses, black and still, the shadow mass of St. Pancras church, the great dark open space in front of the church, a shadowy figure-haunted darkness with the vague stream of the Euston Road running to one side of it and the corridor of Woburn Place opening on the other. The harsh voice of an invisible woman sounded out from it as she turned off into her own street. …” Dressed up — he was — to the bloody death.” . . . The words echoed about her as she strolled down the street controlling her impulse to flinch and hurry. The woman was there, there and real and that was what she had said.Resentment was lurking about the street. The woman’s harsh voice seemed close. Miriam pictured her glaring eyes. There was no pretence about her. She felt what she said. She belonged to the darkness about St. Pancras church . . . people had been garrotted in that part of the Euston Road not so very long ago. . . . Tansley Street was a soft grey gloaming after the darkness. When she rattled her key into the keyhole of number seven she felt that her day was beginning. It would be perpetually beginning now. Nights and days were all one day; all hers, unlimited.”

She spends time with other women who have rooms in the same house as her; she visits her sister Harriett, who is happily settled as a wife and mother to be, and her sister Eve whose situation is less happy; she attends lectures with a work colleague; and books and music continue to illuminate her life.

She even learns to ride a bicycle, and, after an awkward start, she relishes the freedom that gives her.

It was difficult to form a clear picture of the whole of Miriam’s life, but I saw the arc of the story clearly: that in her room and out in the world Miriam was establishing a life if her own.

She made contact with an old school friend and was invited to stay with her and her writer husband in the country. Miriam felt a little out of her depth when she met their literary friends, but she was fascinated by them and she realised that she wanted to be part of their world. On the train home she remembered things that had been said that she wanted to remember that she wanted to use to impress her friends – that reminded me of the Miriam of the earlier books who had been uncomfortable in social situations, and of how far she had come – and she thought much on things that her friend’s husband had said.

“Gazing out at the exciting silent pines — so dark and still, waiting, not knowing about the wonders of English — Miriam recalled her impressions of those of the authors she knew. It was true that those were their effects and the great differences between them. How did he come to know all about it and to put it into words? Did the authors know when they did it? She passionately hoped not. If they did, it was a trick and spoilt books. Rows and rows of ” fine ” books ; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, ” men of letters ” ; and looking out for approbation. If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. English a great flexible language ; more than any other in the world. But German was the same? Only the inflections filled the sentences up with bits. English was flexible and beautiful. Funny. Foreigners did not think so. Many English people thought foreign literature the best. Perhaps Mr. Wilson did not know much foreign literature. But he wanted to ; or he would not have those translations of Ibsen and Bjornsen. German poetry marched and sang and did all sorts of things. Anyhow it was wonderful about English — but if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how some-body else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books, knowing all about style would be to become like a man. Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd. There was something wrong. It was in all those books upstairs. ” Good stuff ” was wrong, a clever trick, not worth doing. And yet everybody seemed to want to write.”

That there was so much reflection is telling I’m sure. There has been little reflection in the parts of ‘Pilgrimage’ that I have read so far and that disappoints me, particularly now that there has clearly been some upheaval in the Henderson family.

Miriam and Mr Wilson didn’t meet again in this book, but I am quite sure that they will in the next.

I found much to love in this book. There is a wealth of detail, I am still so taken with Miriam and with Dorothy Richardson’s writing; but I am finding the gaps in the narrative and the literary impressionism a little more difficult than I did in the earlier books of the series.

That might be because this is a longer book than those, or it might be the stage that Miriam has reached in life.

Time will tell ….

[David]

Just noticed a minor curiosity: Richardson was published by the firm for which the young Powell went to work upon coming down to London. As is the general unifying style for the entire Pilgrimage sequence, we are deeply inside the mind of Miriam Henderson, which is not always a comfortable place to be. Miriam seems to change jobs with every volume—for number four she’s a kind of dental assistant—but her general dissatisfaction with the world into which she is expected to fit remains consistent.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first mature novel in the series. There's a sense that Richardson is perfecting her style.

[marianina · Rating 5 out of 5]

war is over

[Surreysmum · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this in the mid-90s, but it is indicative how difficult I find Richardson's style that I remembered little or nothing of it. Indeed, it's the passing moment, the visualization and accumulation of the detail that is everything, and the plot is slight to nonexistent. Nonetheless, I will endeavour to summarize it... Miriam has her own flat for the first time; she's 21, and working as a dental secretary. Her sister Harriett is pregnant, and her sister Eve does not appear, but a former associate, Miss Dear (a nurse) does, and rather dramatically collapses into Miriam's care in the last few chapters. If Miss Dear has an illustrative function, it is as the woman who conducts her life by manipulation and guilt, particularly of men. Miriam herself is going through a strong phase of misandry: "'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart - 'tis woman's whole existence.' Byron did not know what he was saying when he wrote it in his calm patronizing way. Mr. Tremayne would admire it as a 'great truth' - thinking it like a man in the way Byron thought it. What a hopeless thing a man's consciousness was. How awful to have nothing but a man's consciousness. One could test it so easily if one were a little careful, and know exactly how it would behave..." There is much more in this vein, going well beyond feminism to a rather tedious extent. Mr. Tremayne, incidentally, is one of a number of male objects who pass through Miriam's view as potential mates, the most serious of whom is the dentist Mr. Hancock, on whom she clearly develops a bit of a crush. He hurts her feelings by withdrawing into formality when he perceives - or has it drawn to his attention by well-meaning relatives - that they are too much like friends (one manifestation of this is attending scientific lectures together). In addition, Miriam has two "new woman" friends, Mag and Jan, who share a flat; and she makes a weekend visit to the home of "Hypo Wilson", who is reputedly based on H.G. Wells (a lover of Richardson's); the portrait is not flattering at all at this point - he is drawn as a bit of a stick; a rationalist; his conversation has "chilly light." Nonetheless, Miriam appears to be charmed to be invited into a writer's circle, even though she has serious doubts about whether she's the right kind of people. Perhaps the most enduring image of this particular segment in the saga is Miriam's trip on a bicycle - she has learned to ride, and it is a new and different manifestation of the freedom she has already discovered as a single woman living and working in London.

[Kristel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning of the narrator's years in London. She starts out in The Tunnel describing living in an attic room that may have been like a tunnel. Miriam is living in London, young and single. This is the late 1800s so that is quite the accomplishment. She is earning her own living as a dentist assistant. Miriam seems to be at a happy point in her life.

These questions are not fully answered in the narration: What happened to Miriam's mother, what happened to her disgraced father. How are the sister's doing. How about the brothers in law (Bennett and Gerald).

New characters; Mag and Jan. Riding bicycles in the night in their knickers. I enjoyed the part about the two day solo bike trip that Miriam takes to Wilshire/Savernake Forest. Independence of movement, freedom to travel, and speed to get away from threats.

There is a lot of info in this book about women's life. This is really where you start getting the feel of truly feminist book this is.

Miss Eleanor Dear: interesting character, not sure I liked. She is sick with tuberculosis and in poverty. Miss Dear may have a tragic life but I did not like how she used others. It seemed dishonest. I wasn't quite sure how they met each other

[Desiree · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the protagonist and her thoughts/ideas about women and feminism. But the book is hard to read :)