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
.
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, 2000.
41-2
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, 1977–1984, 5 vols.
2: 156
She was close...
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.
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994.
228
Her own summary of her career, however, was that she tried...
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...
Literary responses
Mary Butts
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
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...
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, 1983.
349
This was printed in the first issue of the new revue Mesures. Mesures was managed by Adrienne Monnier
with Jane Van Meter
Publishing
Dora Marsden
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
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, 1963.
173-4, 241
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
...
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...
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...
