Dorothy Richardson

17 May 1873 - 17 June 1957. British journalist and author. Full name Dorothy Miller Richardson.

Biography

Dorothy Miller Richardson was born on 17 May 1873 in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. There she also spent her early childhood until her family moved to London. Due to her father's financial problems, she had to leave school and took on a position as governess in Hanover in 1890/91. After six months she returned to England taking up several other governessing jobs and nursing her mentally ill mother until after her death in 1896, Richardson moved to Bloomsbury, London, working as a receptionist.

After having lived several years in the capital, where she came in contact with various radical political groups such as the anarchists, as well as writers as H. G. Wells, she moved to the countryside in 1908. She stayed on a Quaker farm in Sussex for three years until eventually moving to Cornwall in 1912. Having already published some articles and sketches, Richardson, in the same year, began working on Pointed Roof, the first part of her Pilgrimage series, which would become her life's work.

In 1917 she married the artist Alan Odle and they lived in London and Cornwall, supported by her work as translator and journalist, until Odle's death in 1948. Richardson continued writing until 1954 and died three years later in a nursing home. March Moonlight, the last novel in her oeuvre was never finished and published posthumously in 1967.

Writing

Her main work, Pilgrimage, consisting of 13 novels published between 1915 and 1967, traces the experiences of the autobiographically-based female protagonist Miriam Henderson between the 1890s and the First World War. The series is an exploration of contemporary themes such as the struggle for female identity in a rapidly changing world, the experience of metropolitan and urban space and the effect of modernity on female life in general. Her literary significance is also due to the narrative style in Pilgrimage, which introduced the “stream-of-consciousness” technique to the English novel. Apart from Pilgrimage and her journalistic activity, Richardson also published two non-fictional works as well as several reviews, short stories and a few poems.

Dettmar, Kevin J. “Dorothy Richardson”. Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature Vol. 3. ed. David S. Kastan. Oxford: UP, 2005, 361-364.

Fromm, Gloria G. Dorothy Richardson. A Biography. Urbana et al.: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Rosenberg, John. Dorothy Richardson. The Genius They Forgot. A Critical Biography. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1973.

Watts, Carol. Dorothy Richardson. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995.