2005-01-15 A passionate individualism

The series of thirteen novels collectively titled "Pilgrimage" was Dorothy Richardson's life work, written over several decades and constituting the bulk of her published writing. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why she remains a relatively neglected figure among the great Modernist writers: "Pilgrimage" is a rather daunting undertaking for any reader, in terms of length alone. However, although the "Pilgrimage" novels are on the whole deeply serious works, they are endlessly rewarding and there are many surprising incidental pleasures to be had along the way.

"The Tunnel", the fourth novel in the sequence and the opening volume of Virago's Volume 2 of "Pilgrimage", is a case in point. All of the novels basically constitute an exercise in warts-and-all self-portraiture, as Richardson recounts the life of her alter ego Miriam Henderson. Events are filtered through Miriam's consciousness: Richardson is rigorous in denying the reader any other character's point of view. The preceding book ("Honeycomb") had ended with Miriam's mother's suicide. However, although Miriam has clearly been through some dark times after this, the opening of "The Tunnel" finds her in upbeat and adventurous mood as she moves into a Bloomsbury attic room and takes a job as a dentist's receptionist. There is a remarkable sense of newfound freedom as she makes friends; attends public lectures at the Royal Society; learns to ride a bike - the latter quite daring for late Victorian times, but obviously exhilarating, as described by Miriam's secretary friend Mag: "You feel like a sprite you are so light, and you feel so strong and capable and so broadshouldered you could knock down a policeman. Jan and I knocked down several last night." Richardson had a good ear for conversation, and despite her deep distrust of easy witticism, she does allow the reader some lighter moments (for instance in the shape of the Jan and Mag secretarial double-act).

The book has its darker moments too: Miriam has not entirely emerged from the shadow of her mother's death, and it is easy to sense the ocean of sadness behind the short, agonised Chapter VII (Richardson had a sure touch for understated tragedy). Linked with her mother's suicide, which Miriam partly blames on her society's treatment of women in general, is Richardson's gradual exposition of her own, very personal brand of feminism. This takes the form of an absolute insistence on the validity and importance of individual human experience, especially female experience. In Chapter XXIV, for instance, we get a rather thrilling outbreak of rage after Miriam comes across a very misogynistic encyclopaedia entry under "Woman": "If one could only burn all the volumes; stop the publication of them. But it was all books, all the literature in the world, right back to Juvenal ... Education would always mean coming in contact with all that ... How could [women] endure it? How could they go on living and laughing and talking?" (There are echoes here of Carol Shields' "Unless": perhaps we haven't made as much progress over the last hundred years as we might like to think.)

After the expansiveness of "The Tunnel", "Interim" is as provisional and unsettling as its title, dealing largely with Miriam's awkward and embarrassing nearly-romances with two of the male fellow-lodgers at her boarding-house.

Richardson's relative neglect is a pity, for she had a style and a world view that were quite distinct from the other Modernists. Virginia Woolf (with her passionate concern for aesthetics and her moments of epiphany) is perhaps the closest, but the overall "feel" of Richardson's prose is quite different. Her brand of passionate individualism still has a lot to offer today's readers.