BY NO stretch of usage can ‘virago’ be made not to signify a shrew, a scold, an ill-tempered woman, unless we go back to the etymology – a man-like maiden (cognate with ‘virile’) – and the antique meaning, amazon, that is close to it. It is an unlovely and aggressive name, even for a militant feminist organisation, and it presides awkwardly over the reissue of a great roman fleuve which is too important to be associated with chauvinist sows. The novel is a bisexual form. If it is claimed for Pilgrimage that the female sensibility is exhibited, and the importance of the female point of view is exploited, to an extent very salutary in a male-dominated world, much the same may be said of every major novel written by an author who happens, by chance, to be a man, from Pamela to Take a Girl Like You. The masculine novel exists eccentrically with Hemingway, though he had to learn from Gertrude Stein. For the rest, any serious novelist regards as a vocational imperative the probing of the sensibility of the other sex. When, as so often in American colleges, I am told that Madame Bovary has to be a failure because it was written by a man, I shudder at the loss of belief, promoted by a sectional interest, in the powers of the creative imagination. Jane Austen’s men are imaginative triumphs; and so are Shakespeare’s women.
Dorothy Richardson’s novel is unusual in its length – thirteen volumes and, in this very fine edition, 2110 pages – and in its unrelenting solipsism. The first volume, Pointed Roofs, appeared in 1915 and was greeted unsympathetically because its mise en scène is a cultured and pacific Germany. But, when Jacob’s Room and Ulysses came out and the ‘experimental’ novel startled and excited, Dorothy Richardson was seen to have been a pioneer in the breaking of old epistemological conventions. The continuum of life is contained by the observing sensibility, time is as fluid with her as with Proust, of whom she is the sole British analogue, and scene and action are more fictions of the mind than external realities. A corresponding stylistic fluidity encompassed devices like the interior monologue and a disdain for traditional punctuation. After Ulysses, Dorothy Richardson was talked of a great deal but not much read, or else read desultorily as Les Lauriers Sont Coupés was read – to see how much ground was broken with picks, before Joyce the master came along with his electric drills.
To be honest, Pilgrimage is sometimes laborious reading. Its author, on whom German influences were strong, accepted Goethe’s programme for fiction: ‘in the novel, reflections and incidents should be featured; in drama, character and action. The novel must proceed slowly, and the thought-processes of the principal figures must, by one device or another, hold up the development of the whole… The hero of the novel must be acted upon, or, at any rate, not himself be the principal operator…’ And so, with a painful slowness of which Dorothy Richardson herself was painfully unaware, the sensibility of her heroine, Miriam Henderson, is set forth in its progress from early uncertainty to eventual maturity. The pilgrimage is that of an independent woman like Dorothy Richardson herself, a new Aurora Leigh or Jane Eyre, forced to earn her living in a man’s world, despising the traditional female role Victorian society would impose on her, rejecting men’s standards but not altogether rejecting men.
Miriam’s experiences parallel those of her creatrix, but the standards we must bring to the work are those of pure fiction, not autobiography. By contemporary, or Jongian standards, the experiences are limited. Though an aspect of the novel’s undoubted greatness is the sharpness of sensuous detail, the erotic plays no part in it. Nor, for that matter, does the feminist activism which was live enough in the period covered – the late Victorian and Edwardian – drag the work out of art and into propaganda. There is an intense intellectual excitement: ideas flash, books are read and the news is discussed. But Pilgrimage is not a cerebral work, and it is far from tendentious. When, as in the volume Deadlock, male domination provokes irritability, Miriam keeps her thoughts to herself, does not shout in Hyde Park:
Because some women had corns, feminine beauty was a myth; because the world could do without Mrs Hemans’s poetry, women should confine their attention to puddings and babies. The infernal complacent cheek of it… On whose authority had men decided that science and art were greater than anything else? The world could not go on until this question had been answered. Until then, until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness.
From the moment in Pointed Roofs when Miriam notes how the common chord of C is the same as that of E flat and yet different, we know that we are to be in the company of a sensorium to which sound is of large importance. Pilgrimage is, among other things, about sounds, especially the sounds of speech. In no other work, to my knowledge, is there such a profound concern with the class and national aspects of spoken English, which is always reproduced with uncanny exactitude. There is no voice, whatever language it speaks, which does not leap from the page straight to the inner ear. The processes of speech, with their incoherences and illogicalities, provide a kind of model for the proclaimed stylelessness of the récit. Dorothy Richardson disdained style as masculine posturing, the setting up of syntactical public monuments.
T.S. Eliot said, at tea with Virginia Woolf, that Ulysses represented the death of style. Old styles are ostentatiously killed in Ulysses, while Joyce’s own voice improvises new kinds of music appropriate to whatever subject sails into the consciousness of the operative, or non-operative, character. The same is true of Dorothy Richardson. In the magnificent Oberland the alpine scenery which takes possession of Miriam’s senses clots the sentence structures, too massive to be contained in elegance. And yet there is always the sense of a substructure, deeper than conventional grammar, which signifies the assurance, the achieved personality, of the mature Miriam. Original as Pilgrimage is, like Ulysses it abounds in evidence of the traditional novelistic virtues: awareness of the whole range of human experience, fascination with people, especially when they are speaking, the power of psychological penetration to the deepest level, skill with language, the ability to create a world. If we want the immediate impact on the senses of the Victorian and Edwardian age, we must go to Dorothy Richardson.
She resembles no other writer. Perhaps, falsely, we catch an echo of Last Post, the final volume of Ford’s Parade’s End. Or we may think, in the slow scrupulousness of notation, we are near to Henry James. But ultimately this is a work of profound individuality. If we find boredom, that is because we are looking for the wrong thing – the fevered activity of the popular novel, the gross exhibitionism of the fiction of the sexual revolution. And if there is a genuine fault, it lies in the consistency of the solipsism: we cannot get outside Miriam, as we can outside Bloom or Mrs Dalloway. But this is the condition of the enterprise and we must accept it. Whatever the motives of the Virago organisation in presenting the first popular edition of the work, lovers of literature, or either sex, unconcerned with sexism, must be grateful to it for the recovery of a great fictional masterpiece. Or, God help us, mistresspiece.
Guardian, 9 December 1979
Review of Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson
(London: Virago Press, 1979)