a gallimaufry

Pointed Roofs, by Dorothy Richardson

Miriam wondered again and again whether her companions shared this sense with her. Sometimes when they were all sitting together she longed to ask, to find out, to get some public acknowledgment of the magic that lay over everything. At times it seemed as if could they all be still for a moment – it must take shape. It was everywhere, in the food, in the fragrance rising from the opened lid of the tea-urn, in all the needful unquestioned movements, the requests, the handings and thanks, the going from room to room, the partings and assemblings. It hung about the fabrics and fittings of the house. Overwhelmingly it came in through oblongs of window giving on to stairways. Going upstairs in the light pouring in from some uncurtained window, she would cease for a moment to breathe.

Whenever she found herself alone she began to sing, softly. When she was with others a head drooped or lifted, the movement of a hand, the light falling along the detail of a profile could fill her with happiness.

It made companionship a perpetual question. At rare moments there would come a tingling from head to foot, a faint buzzing at her lips and at the tip of each finger. At these moments she could raise her eyes calmly to those about her and drink in the fact of their presence, see them all with perfect distinctness, but without distinguishing one from the other. She wanted to say, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary? Do you realize?’ She felt that if only she could make her meaning clear all difficulties must vanish. Outside in the open, going forward to some goal through sunny mornings, gathering at inns, wading through the scented undergrowth of the woods, she would dream of the secure return to Waldstrasse, their own beleaguered place. She saw it opening out warm and familiar back and back to the strange beginning in the winter. They would be there again to-night, singing.

Pointed Roofs is so full of beautiful passages like the one above it is impossible to resist quoting them just for the sake of it. Published in 1915 but based on Dorothy Richardson’s six months teaching at a school in Germany in 1890, it received mixed reviews: the Observer called it a ‘Fine New Novel’, adding, ‘the whole is clear with a clarity as keen as the gables of the charming “pointed roofs”’ and the New York Times Book Review recognised a ‘remarkable’ achievement, while the Saturday Review Literary Supplement declared: ‘The book is a charted dissection of an unsound mind. It lays bare the workings of a sick imagination...’ (All reviews quoted from the Dorothy Richardson website.)

(Dorothy Richardson and classmates at Southborough House, Putney, c. 1890; from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Room, Yale University; can you guess which one is Dorothy? Click on the photograph to enlarge it)

In order to alleviate her family’s financial troubles, Miriam Henderson accepts a job as an English teacher in Fräulein Pfaff’s finishing school in Hanover for German and English girls. Her work turns out to be less than arduous: reading English with the German pupils and accompanying them on outings and errands. As winter warms into spring and then summer, so Miriam settles into the gentle domestic rhythms of the school, but always observing and questioning.

The book is narrated in the third person but exclusively from Miriam’s point of view, so that it could have been written in the first person. The prose flickers easily from perception to thought or emotion and back again, as you might see in the passage which opens this post. It creates a sort of intellectual or intellectualised sensuality. Here, one hot afternoon, the school is taking tea:

Funny German dresses, thought Miriam, funny . . . and old. Her mind hovered and wondered over these German dresses – did she like them or not – something about them [...] that made these German dresses utterly different from anything the English girls could have worn. What was it? It was crowned by the Bergmanns’ dresses. It had begun in a summer dress of Minna’s, black with a tiny sky-blue spot and a heavy ruche round the hem. She thought she liked it. It seemed to set the full tide of summer round the table more than the things of the English girls – and yet the dresses were ugly – and the English girls’ dresses were not that . . . they were nothing . . . plain cottons and zephyrs with lace tuckers – no ruches. It was something . . . somehow in the ruches – the ruches and the little peaks of neck.

A faint scent of camphor came from the Martins across the way, sitting in their cool creased black-and-white check cotton dresses. They still kept to their hard white collars and cuffs. As tea went on Miriam found her eyes drawn back and back again to these newly unpacked camphor-scented dresses . . . and when conversation broke after moments of stillness . . . shadowy foliage . . . the still hot garden . . . the sunbaked wooden room beyond the sunny saal, the light pouring through three rooms and bright along the table . . . it was to the Martins’ checked dresses that she glanced.

It was intensely hot, but the strain had gone out of the day; the feeling of just bearing up against the heat and getting through the day had gone; they all sat round . . . which was which? . . . Miriam met eye after eye – how beautiful they all were, looking out from faces and meeting hers – and her eyes came back unembarrassed to her cup, her solid butter-brot and the sunlit angle of the garden-wall and the bit of tree just over Fräulein Pfaff’s shoulder. She tried to meet Mademoiselle’s eyes, she felt sure their eyes could meet. She wondered intensely what was in Elsa’s mind behind her faint hard blue dress. [...] Once or twice she felt Fräulein’s look; she sustained it, and glowed happily under it without meeting it; she referred back contentedly to it after hearing herself laugh out once – just as she would do at home; once or twice she forgot for a moment where she was. The way the light shone on the housekeeper’s hair, bright brown and plastered flatly down on either side of her bright white-and-crimson face, and the curves of her chocolate and white striped cotton bodice, reminded her sharply of something she had seen once, something that had charmed her . . . it was in the hair against the hard white of the forehead and in the flat broad cheeks with the hard, clear crimson colouring nearly covering them . . . something in the way she sat, standing out against the others . . .

Miriam’s impressions are principally visual and this gives a painterly quality to the writing, most particularly in the description of the housekeeper. In contrast to the precision of her observations, her thoughts are messy, wandering. Richardson’s use of the ellipsis mimics the way that the thoughts trail off, pause, circle back, switch to something fresh. Miriam is unable to decide what it is that really differentiates the German dresses from the English, what it is that the housekeeper reminds her of or even which particular quality of the housekeeper it is – the way her hair reflects the light in combination with the curves of her bodice, the contrast of the brown hair against the white forehead and crimson cheeks, the attitude in which she sits – which strikes up the echo in her memory. She cannot find a conclusive interpretation for what she sees, resists it perhaps, preferring the open-ended. The right words don’t exist or she just can’t find them.

(‘Hannover Marktkirche met Rathaus’, undated photograph but probably taken around the time the novel is set; from here)

The novel proceeds in episodes – a musical evening, writing letters home on a Saturday morning, the school hairwash (Miriam is disgusted to find that an egg is used in place of shampoo), an encounter on the stairs, a snatched moment playing the piano, a trip to a café. This structure matches the prose style to create something close to lived experience, its fragmentary nature and constant state of flux. Focusing as it does on the day-to-day, it makes ordinary life beautiful and important.

The other characters in the book are elusive, filtered through Miriam’s consciousness. Many of the girls are not really individualised, they exist only as a few recorded impressions. Miriam is highly sensitive to whether or not they like her; she tries to read their behaviour for signs but not always very successfully, given her surprise at the affection her pupils show her at the end when she is about to leave the school. Central to life in the school is of course the headmistress, Fräulein Pfaff. Generally she presents a calm, pious, almost maternal façade, impossible to read, but some episodes witnessed by Miriam crack it open. Once she shocks Miriam by screaming angry taunts at the servant, Anna, and firing her. After a powerful thunderstorm which terrifies most of the girls, Miriam believes she regards her briefly as an equal: ‘It was as if they had embraced.’ She shares Miriam’s admiration for the lovely rich girl, Ulrica, and has a vitriolic hatred of ‘relations’ between men and women, to the extent that when she finds Miriam and one of the masters in conversation she appears disgusted.

(A very pointed roof; ‘Hannover Potthof’, undated print by ‘Bruck’; from here)

Setting the novel in a girls’ boarding school necessarily places female concerns at its heart. Pointed Roofs is essentially domestic in scope, and as a finishing school producing young ladies who are to be suitable middle-class wives, Fräulein Pfaff’s establishment is modest in its educational ambitions. Indeed, Fräulein Pfaff reveals as much in her outburst against the ‘impurity’ of talking about men – ‘Like a dawn, like a dawn for purity should be the life of a maiden. Calm, and pure and with holy prayer’ – and talks hysterically of ‘cleaning’ the school of ‘vile’ influences. But Miriam is a feminist, horrified at the contempt of the German masters to girls’ education, driven to contrast this school with the one she attended (based on Southborough House, a progressive school where Richardson was a pupil) which valued women’s intelligence and scholarship. When she fancifully toys with the idea of marrying a German, she is secretly repelled by the dutiful hausfrau figure she conjures up as her future.

So Dorothy Richardson takes women and women’s education as her subject matter and the consciousness of an individual woman as her vehicle (but also her subject), inventing a new form in which to do so. There are shades of Villette here, but the tone is much lighter and often humorous. Should anyone have managed to wade this far through my post, then go immediately from here and buy a copy. If you enjoy the work of Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield, you will love this. Really. Dorothy Richardson ought to be much more widely read. I feel strongly. I may campaign.

Dorothy Richardson on Pilgrimage

Following on from my earlier post, I thought I would write a little about Dorothy Richardson’s intentions for Pilgrimage before discussing the first book or ‘chapter’, Pointed Roofs. In their edition Virago reprinted a foreword Richardson wrote in 1938, presumably to the first four-volume collection of Pilgrimage. Richardson uses this Foreword to restore her reputation and insist on her place in English letters as the inventor of a new form for the novel.

Richardson begins by explaining how the novel, in 1911, was dominated by realism. It was then that she decided to write a novel herself, which she saw as a gendered task:

Since all these novelists [Bennett’s successors] happened to be men, the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.

She chose the second path, but quickly became dissatisfied with her work and the inadequacy of the form to express the reality she perceived. Her explanation is extremely tortuous in terms of syntax, as if she found it difficult to put into words but at the same time was fastidious in conveying it as precisely as possible:

Aware, as she wrote [Richardson writes of herself in the third person throughout the Foreword], of the gradual falling away of the preoccupations that for a while had dictated the briskly moving script, and of the substitution, for these inspiring preoccupations, of a stranger in the form of contemplated reality having  for the first time in her experience its own say, and apparently justifying those who acclaim writing as the surest means of discovering the truth about one’s own thoughts and beliefs, she had been at the same time increasingly tormented, not only by the failure, of this now so independently assertive reality, adequately to appear within the text, but by its revelation, whencesoever focused, of a hundred faces, any one of which, the moment it was entrapped within the close mesh of direct statement, summoned its fellows to disqualify it.

In fact, reality itself, or ‘contemplated reality’, is given form as a critic looking over Richardson’s shoulder, that form having been given by the act of writing itself. In other words, the subject of the literary act is continuously commenting on it, as if art and reality are caught in a continuous, looping dialogue.

In 1913, the opening pages of the attempted chronicle became the first chapter of ‘Pilgrimage,’ written to the accompaniment of a sense of being on a fresh pathway, an adventure so searching and, sometimes, so joyous as to produce a longing for participation [...]

Richardson is anxious throughout the Foreword to emphasise the originality, the ‘freshness’, of her work as it is fundamental to her fashioning her reputation. She is absolutely determined to establish herself as the first novelist to walk along this literary ‘path’, to use ‘stream of consciousness’ in English (not that she likes the term, satirically characterising it as ‘gladly welcomed by all who could persuade themselves of the possibility of comparing consciousness to a stream’) and to that end turns to a discussion of competitors for that title.

Richardson mentions ‘two figures’ who had simultaneously embarked on the ‘lonely track’ she had taken: ‘a woman mounted upon a magnificently caparisoned charger’ and ‘a man walking, with eyes devoutly closed, weaving as he went a rich garment of new words [...]’. I assume these are Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and wonder why she does not name them. She acknowledges that Proust actually got there first, but he could not have influenced her since she had not read his work and had only second-hand information about it (‘News came [...] said to be [...]’):

News came from France of one Marcel Proust, said to be producing an unprecedentedly profound and opulent reconstruction of experience focused from within the mind of a single individual [...]

Henry James was another (named) rival and here Richardson really betrays her ambition to be accepted as the first to tread the ‘lonely track’:

Finally, however, the role of pathfinder was declared to have been played by a venerable old gentleman, a charmed and charming high priest of nearly all the orthodoxies, inhabiting a softly lit enclosure he mistook, until 1914, for the universe, and celebrated by evolving, for the accommodation of his vast tracts of urbane commentary, a prose style demanding, upon the first reading, a perfection of sustained concentration akin to that which brought if forth [...]

Apart from the swift blow with the claws, one can almost hear her muttering ‘I am the pathfinder!’ and she admits ‘it was [...] not without a sense of relief that the present writer discovered, in [James’s criticism on] “Wilhelm Meister” [...]’ that she found James laying out rules for The Novel which differed entirely from her approach. So he was not the pathfinder after all!

Having settled the question of originality, Richardson ends her Foreword with a defence of her punctuation:

Feminine prose, as Charles Dickens and James Joyce have delightfully shown themselves to be aware, should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions. And the author of ‘Pilgrimage’ must confess to an early habit of ignoring, while writing, the lesser of the stereotyped system of signs, and, further, when finally sprinkling in what appeared to be necessary, to a small unconscious departure from current usage. While meeting approval, first from the friend who discovered and pointed it out to her, then from an editor who welcomed the article she wrote to elucidate and justify it, and, recently, by the inclusion of this article in a text-book for students of journalism and its translation into French, the small innovation, in further complicating the already otherwise sufficiently complicated task of the official reader, helped to produce the chaos for which she is now justly reproached.

In other words, dear reader, should you find Richardson’s prose difficult the reason is that you are a dunderhead. I enjoy her feigned humility. Richardson seems similarly humble earlier in the Foreword. She is rather disingenuous about how Pointed Roofs and its sequel came to be published, claiming it was entirely through the insistence of a ‘kind friend’ rather than her own efforts or ambitions. (‘Oh, I didn’t think of publishing but other people persuaded me [because my work is SO amazing]’ is actually rather a Renaissance trope, and has a lot of precedents among female writers from times when publishing their literary work was considered Unwomanly.) (Not that I disbelieve her account, I just think that she may not have been quite as diffident as she implies.)

(Dorothy Richardson (1917), from Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Richardson is deadly serious in this Foreword, recognising it as her chance to establish her reputation. She was, after all, sixty-five years old when she wrote it and all too aware not only of how undervalued her fiction was in comparison to all those she referenced in the Foreword, but also that she did not have unlimited time or opportunity left to rectify that. Consequently I found that the prose labours slightly under the weight it carries; the passage I quoted, near the beginning of this post, in which she describes her realisation that her original form was inadequate took several readings to yield its meaning to me and her sentences tend to be long and qualified by many subclauses, as if she tried to pack in as much as she could while rendering an accurate and nuanced account. I think she was also rather uncomfortable about promoting herself, hence the moments of catty wit and unconvincing humility – she isn’t sure how to do it, despite having a strong sense of her own worth as a novelist. All of which I find endearing.

It is also interesting that she places her work as in the realist tradition but in opposition to the ‘male’ novel. (As I mentioned in the earlier post, Elaine Showalter traces this antagonism to her affair with H.G. Wells.)

And when I do finally start writing about Pointed Roofs itself, you will see when I quote from it that, in this novel at least, her novelistic style was entirely unlike the Foreword: vivid, ‘joyous’, fresh and luminous.

Dorothy Richardson

I was intending to tackle the modernists chronologically, as far as possible. But I was too impatient to wait for myself to complete the reading list, which would have indicated where to start and excitedly plunged right into Pointed Roofs, the first book or chapter of Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen-novel record of the life of Miriam Henderson, Pilgrimage. Pointed Roofs, begun in 1913 and published in 1915, is considered the first stream-of-consciousness novel in English, preceding both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway; in fact, Virginia Woolf wrote this of it (quoted on the back of my Virago Modern Classics edition):

There is no one word, such as romance or realism, to cover, even roughly, the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson. The chief characteristic is one for which we still seek a name. She has invented a sentence we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender...proving that the novel is not hung on a nail festooned with glory, but, on the contrary, walks the high road, alive and alert, and brushes shoulders with real men and women...

Yet Richardson is not nearly as well known as James Joyce or Woolf, despite Virago reissuing Pilgrimage and a collection of her short stories as Modern Classics. Indeed, her work has languished out of print for a while, although print on demand seems to be working in her favour and the Virago editions are in print again, albeit at weirdly high prices. I wonder why she is so much more obscure than most of her contemporaries.

Difficulty may be one reason; length may be another, one which discouraged even other modernist writers. When it was originally published, Katherine Mansfield was less than enthusiastic about Richardson’s work, criticising the novels The Tunnel and Interim as lacking proportion, ‘leav[ing] us feeling...that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance’, and complaining that Richardson ‘seems deliberately to set [her mind] a task, just for the joy of realizing again how brilliant a machine it is’. In A Literature of Their Own Elaine Showalter expresses similar reservations, writing that ‘Richardson’s art is afraid of an ending’, and seems to find her resistance to structure problematic. It is possible, therefore, that Richardson’s magnus opus, taken as a whole, did not succeed, or at least her intentions for it were not always understood.

Showalter also claims that Richardson might have been ‘the Gertrude Stein of the English novel if she had been more self-promoting and more affluent’. I think that’s an important point. Undoubtedly, women novelists have struggled to gain the same level of recognition as their male counterparts; without a talent for publicity or influential friends, obscurity has been a real threat to them. Other, better-known modernist women writers did have support. Mansfield was posthumously championed by John Middleton Murry. Jean Rhys was rediscovered by Diana Athill at André Deutsch in the 1960s. Woolf was a central figure in a highly influential artistic and intellectual coterie, and ran her own publishing house. So it would appear, at least initially, that being the female author of an experimental and lengthy work of fiction (and I can think of no other, can you?) was not enough to establish Dorothy Richardson in the popular canon. (I don’t count academics, they’ve been writing about her for years of course.)

So who was Dorothy Richardson? She was born in Abingdon, near Oxford, in 1873, the third of four sisters in a middle-class family. Later the family moved to London, where Dorothy attended a progressive school named Southborough House. Their fortunes had already proved to be somewhat precarious, and when Dorothy was seventeen they suffered a disastrous reversal after her father’s speculations failed. This prompted Dorothy to seek employment and her first appointment was at a German school. She then worked as a teacher and governess in England. On holiday with Dorothy in 1895, her mother Mary committed suicide by cutting her throat with a kitchen knife; Dorothy found her.

Richardson gave up teaching and moved to Bloomsbury where she lived on an attic on a pound a week earned through secretarial work. She had an affair with H.G. Wells which resulted in a miscarriage in 1907. This drove her close to a breakdown and she may have started writing in reaction to this. Indeed, Showalter sees her literary efforts as an attempt to produce an ‘anti-Wells’ novel, one which opposed his masculine realism. She began with short pieces and reviews published in small periodicals and the Saturday Review before embarking on Pilgrimage, which was her life’s work.

In 1917, at the age of forty-four, Richardson married an artist named Alan Odle, fifteen years her junior. The marriage seems to have been a happy one, the couple having shared views of art and literature. They spent their winters in Cornwall and summers in London, Richardson all the while working on Pilgrimage which she published book by book up to the eleventh one, Clear Horizons (1935). In 1938 Dent published Pilgrimage in four volumes, including a twelfth ‘chapter’, Dimple Hill. The final, unfinished chapter, March Moonlight, was published by Dent (and Alfred Knopf in the US) in 1967. Richardson had died in a nursing home in Kent in 1957, Odle in 1948 in Cornwall to which they had retired permanently in 1939. (Further information on Dorothy Richardson can be found at the Dorothy Richardson website.)

(Adrian Allinson, Portrait of Alan Odle and Dorothy Richardson, undated, from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which also has some great photographs of Richardson)

Richardson was political, exploring the intellectual groups of early-twentieth-century London – from the Primrose League to groups of Russian anarchists – and supporting women’s suffrage, including visiting imprisoned suffragettes in Holloway. She actively helped refugee German writers in the 1930s. Her father often called her his ‘son’ – he may have been quite a dominating figure in her life – and Richardson’s life suggests that she resisted the expectations of a woman in turn-of-the-century England. Gillian Hanscombe, in the Virago introduction, suggests that Miriam’s pilgrimage in the novels is partly a journey towards resolving the question of whether that resistance represents a failure or a triumph. Hanscombe also gives a wonderful description of Richardson in later life provided by a niece of Odle’s:

In middle age Richardson still had a golden heap of very long hair, piled on the top of her head; she had a ‘massive’ face, dark brown eyes, a clear skin, and pince-nez balanced on her nose, because she was ‘always reading’. She created the impression of being tall, because she was ‘so stately’. [...] Dorothy talked the most [of her and Odle] and late into the night; she seemed never to do ‘anything ordinary’ and had a voice ‘like dark brown velvet’. She spoke very slowly indeed and was ‘immensely impressive as a person’. Her life seemed to be arranged ‘very very carefully’ and she was ‘not at all spontaneous in her actions’. She could ‘only work on a certain image of herself’ which was ‘very cerebral’. It was hard for her to deal with ordinary people. Although she and Alan were very affectionate with each other, they ‘didn’t touch’. [...] Dorothy [...] was ‘very plump, with white creamy arms and very beautiful hands’; ‘as she spoke she would screw up her eyes and slightly purse her mouth and everyone would listen’.

(Alan Odle sounds most eccentric in appearance: ‘in fact over six feet tall, [he] was very thin, with  waist-length hair wound around the outside of his head. He never cut his hair and rarely his fingernails, but since he had “beautifully long elegant fingers”, the image he presented was not an unattractive one.’)

Miriam Henderson, through whose consciousness Pilgrimage is filtered, is apparently at least partly based on Richardson herself; certainly her life closely resembles the author’s up until her marriage to Odle, and that is the justification for all this biographical information. Still, this post has run on long enough so I will save discussion of Richardson’s purpose in Pilgrimage for another post.

(Edited to add: Many thanks to Martin Steenson of Books and Things and author of The Life and Work of Alan Odle for pointing out two errors in this post.)

(Photograph of Dorothy Richardson (1917) taken from Keele University’s Dorothy Richardson website, a great resource; photograph of Alan Odle by E.O. Hoppé (1916), found here)