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
.
MB
credits British women novelists for modifying the methods of the great European novelists, noting in particular Dorothy Richardson
's perfection of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She draws a contrast between Dorothy Richardson
's Miriam and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sheila Kaye-Smith
She writes at length about her favoured religious authors. As to intellectual novels of the twentieth century, she describes late conversion to enjoyment of Ivy Compton-Burnett
once she accepted her art as abstract: not pictures...
Other radio plays that MW
has written about women writers include An Uncommon Love, based on Hannah Cullwick
's relationship with Arthur Munby
, A Consoling Blue, about Jean Rhys
's writing of...
Desmond MacCarthy
had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
Textual Production
H. D.
During 1927-33 HD contributed to the avant-garde, influential film magazine Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films, which Bryher
funded and of which Kenneth Macpherson
was the official editor. It had a temperate...
Textual Production
May Sinclair
MS
was the first to apply the term stream of consciousness to literature, in a review of Dorothy Richardson
's Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
266
Textual Features
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The Headland was strongly influenced by the writing of Dorothy Richardson
, whom Dawson Scott had met in Cornwall during the first world war. Its story takes three chapters for three cataclysmic days. The protagonist...
Textual Features
Stevie Smith
This highly unusual novel takes the form of a disconnected journal by a publisher's secretary named Pompey, an alienated but irrepressible member of the disregarded female work-force, who is clearly an alter-ego for SS
...
Reception
Bryher
In addition to her lived experiences, Bryher's writing is closely informed by Dorothy Richardson
's critiques of women's schooling in her Pilgrimage series.
Bryher,. The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs. Collins.
173-4, 241
Publishing
Sylvia Beach
SB
and Adrienne Monnier
translated Dorothy Richardson
's About Punctuation in January 1935.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
349
This was printed in the first issue of the new revue Mesures. Mesures was managed by Adrienne Monnier
with Jane Van Meter
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Richardson, Dorothy. Backwater. Duckworth, 1916.
Richardson, Dorothy. “Chronology; Editorial Commentary”. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, edited by Gloria G. Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1995, p. xxix - xxxiii; various pages.
Richardson, Dorothy. Clear Horizon. Dent and Cresset, 1935.
Richardson, Dorothy. Dawn’s Left Hand. Duckworth, 1931.
Richardson, Dorothy, and Dorothy Richardson. “De la ponctuation”. Mesures, translated by. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier.
Richardson, Dorothy. Deadlock. Duckworth, 1921.
Richardson, Dorothy. Gleanings from the Works of George Fox. Headley, 1914.
Richardson, Dorothy. Honeycomb. Duckworth, 1917.
Richardson, Dorothy. Interim. Duckworth, 1919.
Tate, Trudi, and Dorothy Richardson. “Introduction”. Journey to Paradise, Virago, 1989, p. ix - xxxvi.
Richardson, Dorothy. John Austen and the Inseparables. Jackson, 1930.
Richardson, Dorothy, and Trudi Tate. Journey to Paradise. Virago, 1989.
Richardson, Dorothy. Oberland. Duckworth, 1927.
Richardson, Dorothy. Pilgrimage. Dent and Cresset, 1938.
Richardson, Dorothy, and Walter Allen. Pilgrimage. J. M. Dent and Sons, 1967.
Richardson, Dorothy, and J. D. Beresford. Pointed Roofs. Duckworth, 1915.