Dorothy Richardson

Image Credit: London Fictions

Dorothy Richardson
1873-1957

Author, developed stream of consciousness as a narrative technique.

Major works

• The Pilgrimage:
  • Painted Roofs (1915)
  • Backwater (1916)
  • Honeycomb (1917)
  • The Tunnel (1919)
  • Interim (1920)
  • Deadlock (1921)
  • Revolving Lights (1923)
  • The Trap (1925)*
  • Oberland (1927)*
  • Dawn’s Left Hand (1931)*
    • * These three works because of their later publishing dates are only available in a collection of The Pilgrimage 

Known associates

• D.H. Lawrence
• James Joyce
• Katherine Mansfield
• Virginia Woolf

Further reading

• The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness (Gillian E. Hanscombe, Peter Owen, 1982)
  • This source takes a more critical approach to Richardson’s work, especially in relationship to Richardson’s own statements about feminism and female authors. This source seeks to address Richardson and her opinions on feminism and female authors by developing an understanding of what Richardson meant by ‘the feminine’, what she meant by ‘the novel’, and what Richardson meant by stating that attempts to categorize life and art are false to the nature of experience.
• Dorothy Richardson: a Biography (Gloria G. Fromm, University of Illinois, 1977)
  • This biographical source provides one of the first  in-depth examinations of Dorothy Richardson’s life in conjunction with the fictional shape her life took in her novel Pilgrimage. In order to develop the connections between the facts of Richardson’s life and the events or themes in her most famous work, Fromm presents this work that provides background into Richardson’s life as well as the relationship the author had with the novel. The author also seeks to analyze the facts of Richardson’s life to determine or get at the art of this novel as an important modernist work.

Primary sources

• The University of Tulsa Department of Special Collections has a collection related to Dorothy Richardson entitled Dorothy Miller Richardson Papers . This collection consists of papers related to Dorothy Richardson and is separated into three series: correspondence 1928-1952, writings 1909-1959, and miscellaneous materials. Only some of these materials from the collection are available online.