Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Dorothy Richardson
-
Standard Name: Richardson, Dorothy
Birth Name: Dorothy Miller Richardson
Nickname: Tottie
Pseudonym: A Layman
DR
was in her time, and remains, a singular novelist. Her fiction has never conformed to accepted categories, and still challenges literary critics. Her major work, the series of novels comprising Pilgrimage, is now being read as essential to the development of twentieth-century literature and feminism for its thematic and technical innovations. In addition to Pilgrimage, she wrote non-fiction monographs including art criticism, and contributed numerous reviews, essays, sketches, short stories, and poems to periodicals. She also translated several texts from German and French into English. The term stream of consciousness was first applied to literature in a 1918 review of DR
's work by May Sinclair
.
Plans were afoot to relaunch The Freewoman shortly after it collapsed in its first form. When Marsden retreated to Southport for health reasons, Rebecca West
acted as liaison between her and supporters in the Freewoman Discussion Circle
Occupation
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
She served as the club's organizer and hostess. She intended it as a space where fledgling writers could gather and make contact with established authors. Her friend J. D. Beresford
, novelist, was the club's...
Literary responses
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Reception was mixed: some critics awarded high praise, but the American publisher Alfred Knopf
wrote to Heinemann
: the novel is most decidedly not my kind of book . . . . Mrs Dawson Scott...
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press.
228
Her own summary of her career, however, was that she tried...
Literary responses
E. H. Young
One review discerned a possible influence from Dorothy Richardson
, but thought EHY
(whom it supposed to be male) a saner person than Richardson (whom it knew to be female).
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.
The first edition of Ashe of Rings was not extensively reviewed. Although an unimpressed reviewer for the Liverpool Courier characterised it as another bad case of Futurism (like the writing of James Joyce
and Dorothy Richardson
Literary responses
Mary Butts
Although her work received mixed reviews, MB
was generally recognized as an important if eccentric literary figure during her lifetime, and she was highly praised by other modernist writers, including Ezra Pound
, Marianne Moore
Leisure and Society
E. B. C. Jones
EBCJ
had many friends among the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf
hovered between liking and disliking, feeling she could never become intimate with Topsy but welcoming the spruce shining mind.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
2: 156
She was close...
Intertextuality and Influence
Doreen Wallace
In this book DW
strikes out against the stream of consciousness method in fiction. I turn the pages of James Joyce
, Dorothy Richardson
and Virginia Woolf
(Philistine that I am) in the vain hope...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hélène Cixous
Critic Jean Radford
, for one, holds that the concept of écriture féminine put forward by Cixous here and in later works had been to some extent anticipated by Dorothy Richardson
.
Winning, Joanne. The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson. University of Wisconsin Press.
Friends and patrons Dorothy Richardson
and Bryher
were tireless in recruiting women subscribers to sustain Shakespeare and Company
.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
361
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
They developed a relationship that was competitive yet sustaining and essential to both. In August 1920 Woolf commented on Mansfield in her diary: a woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I...
Friends, Associates
Bryher
Bryher
began a friendship with Dorothy Richardson
over tea at Richardson's London home. Bryher secured her invitation with a letter to the author that began, [w]hen I want to remember England, I think of your...