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Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson
Windows on Modernism collects approximately one quarter of the eighteen hundred or so known surviving letters of Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), author of the thirteen-volume serial novel Pilgrimage. An uncompromising and utterly original novelist, Richardson was perhaps the first English writer to employ the style that came to be known as stream of consciousness. She stands alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Proust as one of the great experimentalists in modern prose fiction. By her own estimation the number of words Richardson devoted annually to correspondence was almost equivalent to three of her books. Given the strength of her epistolary urge and the autobiographical nature of Pilgrimage, the letters in Windows on Modernism will stimulate fresh inquiries into Richardson's life and art and their interactions. In light of Richardson's attempt to represent a generation and class of late Victorian and Edwardian women in her fiction, the letters can also be read as cultural documents, conveying the texture of their author's daily life in a world shaped by social and sexual awakenings amid the competing forces of humanism, communism, and fascism.
696 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1995
About the author
Dorothy M. Richardson
68 books66 followersDorothy 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/...
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/...
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 5, 2015
For those of us who love her (and I hope our ranks will continue growing) these letters are essential, and joyous, reading. Much of her warmth is here, and much too that sheds light on her intentions with her work.
I have now read everything of hers that is out there. Novels, short stories, essays, articles (from film reviews to bits on dentistry), poems (not her strong suit) and letters. I have also read her biography. I have no doubt of her genius, nor of her place in the highest ranks of the Modernists. She is the absolute equal of Proust and Woolf and Joyce and Lawrence and all those other "big names" that are endlessly read and written about and sold in fancy editions designed to take pride of place on any bookshelf desirous of being considered discerning. I hope that the forthcoming OUP editions of her work will see her finally taking her proper place in the Canon.
Her last year was in a nursing home. The staff there thought her comments about being a "writer" just an indication of her senility. I do not believe in the concept of "sin" but, if I did, this would surely be one.
I have now read everything of hers that is out there. Novels, short stories, essays, articles (from film reviews to bits on dentistry), poems (not her strong suit) and letters. I have also read her biography. I have no doubt of her genius, nor of her place in the highest ranks of the Modernists. She is the absolute equal of Proust and Woolf and Joyce and Lawrence and all those other "big names" that are endlessly read and written about and sold in fancy editions designed to take pride of place on any bookshelf desirous of being considered discerning. I hope that the forthcoming OUP editions of her work will see her finally taking her proper place in the Canon.
Her last year was in a nursing home. The staff there thought her comments about being a "writer" just an indication of her senility. I do not believe in the concept of "sin" but, if I did, this would surely be one.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews