116. Dorothy Richardson — Dawn’s Left Hand with Scott McCracken and Brad Bigelow

AMY: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my co-host and writing partner, Kim Askew

KIM: Hi, everyone. Amy, the author we're going to be discussing today is credited with writing the first stream-of-consciousness novel in the English language. That was book number one of what would become a semi-autobiographical series that comprised 13 volumes in total. The books cover the period of her life from 1891 until 1915, and that's from her early childhood to the moment she became a writer.

AMY: A 13-book series written in stream-of-consciousness style? Are you kidding? Sounds pretty daunting. But listeners, we know a lot of you out there are just the sort of book nerds to hear this and yell, "Challenge accepted!" 

KIM: Yeah. What's the bibliophile equivalent of "Hold My Beer?"

AMY: Yeah, right. And because it would take us weeks to fully explore Richardson's epic 13-volume work, Pilgrimage, for this episode we'll be focusing in on Book 10 from the series. In this installment, the author depicts her own year-long affair with the author H.G. Wells.

KIM: Now that sounds interesting, so let's read the sticks and get started!

AMY: Kim and I are thrilled to welcome back to the show a returning guest, Brad Bigelow, who joined us last year for an episode on Gertrude Trevelyan, as you may remember. Brad is editorial coordinator for Boiler House Press's Recovered Books series, which brings forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to the attention of new readers.

KIM: On his website, neglectedbooks.com, Brad reflected on his experience reading Dorothy Richardson's 13-volume masterpiece Pilgrimage. He wrote, "It remains perhaps the most profoundly revealing experience in my reading life."

AMY: Wow. That's quite the testimonial! Joining us also is Scott McCracken, who is professor of 20th Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Scott edited the Oxford Critical Edition of the collected works of Dorothy Richardson. So Brad and Scott, welcome to the show. We're so thrilled to have you here. However, Brad... you know, Kim and I love you, but when I started reading this book, I was thinking to myself, "Damn you, Brad! What did you get me into? What is this?" I, I don't know if you could hear me cursing you out from 1100 miles away. Um, Scott, you could have probably heard me screaming all the way over in England. So yeah, my first response diving into the book, uh, these are some of the words: Flummoxed, frustrated, bewildered.

BRAD: And I fully sympathize. Dorothy Richardson takes no prisoners in terms of her demands on readers. She is immersive. She assumes that you are running with her. She writes sentences that go on for a page. She switches chronology without giving you any clue. She is absolutely a very demanding author.

AMY: Scott, and what was your reaction when you first read her?

SCOTT: So, I mean, yes, she's difficult, I'm not gonna deny that. But once you get drawn in, it's very seductive. And I think also, particularly if you love London, it's such a hymn to London as a city that,that really pulled me in.

AMY: Every sentence that she writes is so fraught with meaning and depth, and I felt when I was first reading it, that I needed to figure it out. And then I realized, "No, I kind of have to just go with this." And so it was a weird push and pull because when you feel like, Okay, I'm just gonna allow myself to float over these sentences a little bit, but I feel like I can't do that because that line is so momentous. I, I don't know. Kim, what was your feeling?

KIM: I mean, I, I had a little bit of warning because you read it first and you basically described that experience. So I was ready to kind of just go with the flow a little bit more. Um, and it also really reminded me, and I think we'll talk about this later too, but it really reminded me of Henry James and Ulysses as well in the way that you are trying to figure out what's going on. And there is a lot going on and there's so many references to things, but the writing is so beautiful and so evocative that without having all the knowledge that you might need to have to fully understand that you can still get such a great feeling from the words that she's saying and kind of dive into her experience. I mean, after just reading this one, I could see the obsession with Dorothy Richardson and with this series. Um, readers, if you are willing to stick with it, there's a real payoff. Amy and I both loved it by the end, even going into it, you know, you're a little bit confused. Um, so, yeah, if there's any group out there who's up for the challenge of reading Dorothy Richardson, I feel like it's our listeners, and I'm guessing some of you out there are going to want to run out and read all 13 books in the Pilgrimage series after listening to this episode, and Amy and I are right there with you. We want to join you.

AMY: Yeah, I felt like I was climbing a mountain, you know? And while you're doing the hike, you're like, "I hate this, I hate this," you know? It's a hard way uphill. But then you reach the summit, you take in the view, and it's downright exhilarating, and you want to do it all over again.

BRAD: Absolutely. 

SCOTT: Yeah. I was really struck by what you were saying about letting it flow over you because Richardson talks about not so much reading, but learning to listen. And I think it's that learning to listen to the musicality of the language, to the way that the sentences sound, it's at that point, when you tune in in that way, it really starts to come alive for you and you don't worry about the things you don't know anymore.

KIM: Okay, so without further ado, let's get to know more about Dorothy Richardson. Uh, Brad, do you want to give us a rundown on her life?

BRAD: Sure. Well, Dorothy Richardson was the third of four girls born into what started out to be a comfortable upper middle class English family in 1873. Uh, she and her sisters attended a school that was relatively progressive for its time, and to be honest, we might well never have heard of her had her father not gone bankrupt, which forced her to find a way to make a living when she was about 17 years old. And so she did go to work. She starts out, uh, as a teacher of English in a small girl school in England. That's what's covered in Pointed Roofs, which is the first volume of Pilgrimage. Then she became a teacher in a small English school on the north side of London, and then she was a governess. And then finally she ends up for a long period, over a decade, as the secretary in a dental office in London. And then finally she transitions to become a full time writer and translator. And this is pretty much the same trajectory that her fictional counterpart, Miriam Henderson, follows through Pilgrimage. But it's important to understand, while there are many, many, many parallels between Miriam Henderson's life and Dorothy's Richardson's life, Richardson takes many liberties, particularly in terms of chronology and some of the characters. And so, Richardsons scholars have been employed for decades deciphering and unraveling the interplay between fact and fiction in Pilgrimage.

KIM: So Richardson began writing Pointed Roofs, Book One in the Pilgrimage series in 1912, and it was published in 1915. This was the book that first had the term stream-of-consciousness applied to it by a reviewer. But Richardson actually hated this description, right?

SCOTT: Yes, she loathed it. And it's difficult, in a way, to get to the bottom of why she disliked it so much. But I think one of the key things is that she hated labels. She always wanted to be outside any box that people put her in. But I think one of the main reasons she didn't like the term "stream," because she's definitely writing about consciousness, she doesn't like "stream" because stream implies that you go from A to B. And one thing that Pilgrimage doesn't do is work in a linear fashion. It's much more lateral. She felt that the 19th-century novel just didn't represent women's experience, and she was trying to do something which did, and none of the literary forms available at the time fitted with quite what she wanted to do.

BRAD: It is much more based on the sequence of impressions that one gets. And to be honest, I think that's one of the things that when you get over the initial resistance of Richardson's particular style and you realize what she's doing, it is such an immersive experience compared to almost anything else you read that when you put it down, everything seems to be not as rich an experience.

KIM: Yeah, it takes you further into what reality can be on the page.

AMY: And also, because the whole point of these books is that she's looking inward, right? She's trying to figure out her own soul, and nobody thinks in complete sentences, right? The way she writes is the way we think, so it's like getting to crack open her skull, kind of, and just, and jump in.

BRAD: Absolutely. What goes on throughout Pilgrimage is this character, Miriam, being in the world, seeing things, taking them in, processing them. Do I approve? Does this work for me? Does this not work for me? And we all do that. I mean, that's our everyday living experience.

KIM: And there's not always a pat answer to how you feel about something, and that's in there too. It's like she's taking it in. She doesn't always know how she feels about it, almost.

AMY: Yeah.

SCOTT: And Richardson said she was desperate, for example, to describe Miriam's three sisters, but she refused to, because Miriam wouldn't think about how they looked because she's known them all her life. It wouldn't be at the forefront of her mind. consciousness. That's a really interesting way to approach the novel, and quite radically new for the time.

AMY: And when she wrote the first novel, Pointed Roofs, did she always know that it was gonna be this long series? What was her intention starting out?

BRAD: Well, I think it's clear that Richardson knew that Pilgrimage was going to be a work of multiple books or "chapter volumes" as she'd like to call them. But I think it's also clear that she didn't have a preconceived end in mind. And in reality, she kept on working on Pilgrimage up until almost the very end, and she never did actually finish the final volume, March Moonlight. It was published posthumously, and it was actually incomplete. It was kind of assembled by her husband's sister, who was the executor of her estate.

SCOTT: Yeah, I mean, I'd like to ask you, Brad, whether you think she could finish it? Because, um, the critic Stephen Heath describes it as "inevitably interminable," which is kind of a joke because it feels like it's never going to end, but it's almost like, she's writing her life. How could she finish it if her life wasn't finished? And that open-endedness of the text is a challenge for the reader, but it is also an extraordinary experience. So I think she couldn't finish it and in many ways she didn't want to finish it.

AMY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I had a random thought to "The Sopranos" and the very ending of that, where it just stops in the middle because...

KIM: Yeah. How do you end it? 

AMY: Yeah, it's like, it's almost perfect that she didn't finish that last book.

KIM: Yeah. Um, how were the books received in their time when they were being published?

SCOTT: Well, she was quite a big thing, actually, particularly amongst literary circles. And in the 1920s people would talk about Proust, Joyce and Richardson, all in the same breath. These were the new novelists who were doing something radically different. And she herself read both Joyce and particularly Proust. She loved Proust. Later on in the thirties, she becomes more forgotten, but she's still remembered by other writers. So people like Graham Greene, for example. There's a clear strain amongst, um, women experimental writers in the 20th century that she's an important part of their experience. So somebody like Stevie Smith, who we normally think of as a poet, but wrote three novels, her novels are very influenced by Richardson. And then later, writers like Kay Dick, who you've done a podcast on before, Kay Dick was really interested in Richardson, wanted to write a book about her, tried to visit her in the nursing home, um, but her family blocked access when she was very, very old. Um, and then some of the 1960s experimental writers, writers like Eva Tucker, who until she died, was a really important part of the Richardson Society. So I think there's this strain going all the way through and even today, a modern contemporary writer like Jonathan Coe, the British writer, will talk about how he used to read Virago novels and how important writers like Richardson, in particular, are to him. So I would say she has an almost underground presence within British literature all the way through the 20th century. And now she's becoming better known.

AMY: When you said Proust, Joyce, and Richardson, it makes me want to cry what happened? And, we'll, we'll get into that later, but

KIM: I feel the same, Amy. Yep.

AMY: Okay, so this is probably as good a time as ever to dive into the book Dawn's Left Hand, and Brad, when you originally approached us about doing Richardson, we were gonna do Pointed Roofs, just start at the beginning, but I'm glad that you instead suggested we focus on this novel, the 10th. Why did you suggest this one? And can you kind of set up what we need to know in terms of where the character is at this point?

BRAD: Absolutely. Well Miriam Henderson, the lead character, is in an advanced stage of her emotional and intellectual development. Just before this book, we have the book called Oberland, which is entirely focused on about a week-plus trip that she makes to the Swiss Alps at wintertime. And I think that stepping away from London really provides an opportunity for both the character and Richardson to kind of do a stock- taking and to set her life in perspective. And so I think Oberland plays a really pivotal role in the whole structure of Pilgrimage. And also Dawn's Left Hand has the affair with Hypo Wilson, H.G. Wells's character, which is the piece where we can find lots of, you know, real-life interests for readers who are familiar, they won't necessarily know Dorothy Richardson, but they'll be familiar with H.G. Wells's name and the idea of an affair with a famous writer and all that sort of thing. And you also have the introduction of the character of Amabel, exotic, Anglo-French woman who has a very passionate approach to life, and that brings out something in Miriam that she hasn't kind of experienced before. So there's a lot going on in the book, and I think also we see the kind of more mature Richardsonian style. So, Pointed Roofs is written from the perspective of a girl of 17 encountering the world on her own for the first time. And if you read that book, you'll find that she's missing clues all over the place. Whereas now we have somebody who's become hyper attuned. I mean, she's read lots of Henry James, so she is, much of the book is, and, and much of Richardson's style, which can be frustrating, encountered for the first time is this kind of piecing together and deconstructing of experiences and encounters with other people. And so Dawn's Left Hand is full of that kind of rich, mature, Richardsonian experience.

KIM: I love that about it. Uh, okay, so at the beginning of this novel, as you said, Miriam's returning from her trip to Switzerland. She's on this emotional high. She has a golden glow as she calls it, and I think we can all identify with that feeling after you have an amazing, exhilarating vacation. She is determined to retain the spirit, but she's worried it might slip away. Richardson writes: The jingling hansom was carrying her back to her London, filled with people to whom the golden eternity had been just 14 “ordinary” days and who, knowing nothing of the change in her that at present seemed to be everlasting, would endanger and perhaps destroy it.

 So she's thinking everyone at home can't possibly understand this epiphany she's had. Scott, do you wanna talk about this emotional self-awareness and how it ties into Pilgrimage as a whole?

SCOTT: Yeah, I think this is an important moment in Miriam's life. I mean, she's been in Switzerland, and if you reread Oberland, you realize that she's being incredibly flirtatious with almost everybody she meets. I mean, this is somebody who is ready to start a relationship, but despite the self-awareness that both Brad and I have been talking about, she's also still capable of making mistakes. I mean, one example is when she's on the train at the beginning of Dawn's Left Hand, and she encounters this woman and she decides this woman is completely uninteresting. And then she discovers that the woman is about to get married and suddenly, her view of her completely turns upside down. And one of the things I love about Pilgrimage is that it's happening all the time to Miriam. She comes to an opinion and then she realizes she's wrong, and you go through that whole process with her. But I think there's something else going on as well, that Richardson wrote about other novels not really reaching the truth of life and the truth of experience. And I think this is an almost religious sense of the truth that's under the surface of things. And Miriam feels that she's experienced as, as you said, a kind of epiphany, um, in Switzerland. And she's still looking for that view of the world, which is very much her own, but is also a more transcendent sense of joy. I mean, the word joy is used a lot in the novel, and it's actually a very joyous text, despite its difficulty. And I think that's one of the things that buoys us along, as a reader, and that even though Richardson is often talking about the everyday, the customary, the habitual, she finds joy in those moments and she encourages us to stop and see that joy.

AMY: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that's different about these books is that she is an ordinary woman, and a lot of books you can't have that. That would be too boring. A publisher today would be like, "Put it on the scrap pile, nothing happens to her." I mean, obviously in this book she has the affair, but it's interesting that she doesn't feel the need to make some crazy adventures happen to this girl. She's just living a life. 

KIM: She works at a dental office. I mean, yeah,

BRAD: Absolutely, and actually, one of my favorite chapters in Pilgrimage simply follows Miriam through one very hectic day in the dental office where she's running up, she's doing errands, she's dealing with patients. I mean, I don't know of any other work of fiction that goes that immersively into the immediacy of the working experience. That's just one chapter in this whole massive book.

AMY: Yeah. Alright, so this, um, passage I wanted to mention, I almost didn't include this because it's kind of tangential, but I couldn't help but think of T.S. Eliot when I was reading this one passage when she's walking home alone one night, uh, after a night out at the opera with Hypo and his wife. Because it reminded me so much of his poem, "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." So I'll just read this little section: 

It was time to go, to drop away and face the walk home, alone, through the chilly midnight streets . . . that began to cast, as soon as a space of lamp lit stillness lay between her and the scene she had left, their old, unfailing spell. Unsharable. Although, to-night, the mellow, golden light, falling upon deserted roadway and silent grey stone building, was deepened by the glow of the hours from which she had come forth. 

So, a couple things that I thought was like, why in this day and age was she walking home by herself? It seems like a woman wouldn't be doing that in that era. Um, but also I think it's a really great example of how she pays so much attention to light throughout the novel. So in this case, it's lamplight, but there's also golden light. There's sunshine, um, there's rays of light that beam down. What's her fascination with light?

BRAD: Well, I think this is really one of the key things in the whole of Pilgrimage is the importance of light. Miriam is constantly responding to light. The sight of sunlight reflecting off the rooftops, but also the street lamps, the glow of the street lamps at night. It seems to connect deeply with Miriam's soul, and I think it has to do something with how passionately Miriam and Richardson felt about truth, which, you know, they're both kind of on this quest to find a way of living, I guess, that involves the least amount of deception. Not just on her part, but also on the part of the people that she feels closest to. I think that's one of the reasons why we know from the very beginning that this affair with Hypo Wilson is doomed to fail.

SCOTT: I totally agree with that and I love these lines. I mean, I think so much of Pilgrimage is about the experience of walking through the city streets, and I know these streets and I love them. And you say, Well, why is she a woman walking alone? Like, how else is she gonna get home? She's only on a pound a week. Um, she can't afford a cab. And our views of women at this time are actually a little bit wrong because women did walk through the streets, um, particularly working class women. Um, and it's not that Miriam doesn't encounter dangers. She does. She encounters violence. Um, she gets, uh, stopped by a policeman who thinks she's a prostitute soliciting. So her experience of the streets is not entirely safe, but it's the feeling of independence that she has, which she really values. And I think it's rare to find that in a novel of this period. It's not often represented. It's almost as if women have to be indoors in novels as well as in real life.

AMY: Yeah. And also even when she's with other people, there's a solitariness about her even in those scenes, right? You feel like she's always distant or separated.

KIM: Yeah. She's in her inner world a lot it feels like, yeah. So later, Miriam is at a meeting of socialists when she encounters an intriguing young French woman that Brad was talking about earlier. Her name's Amabel and later on Amabel sneaks into Miriam's room in a boarding house and writes, "I Love You" on her mirror with a piece of Miriam's soap, and it is a total "Whoa!" Moment in the book, right? It's like, "wow, who is this person? What's happening?" 

AMY: Yeah. She's intriguing, but you kind of feel like she's a little dangerous, or that's maybe the sensation that Miriam has. I couldn't quite put my finger on this character at all.

SCOTT: Yeah, I think that's really interesting because Hypo almost exists to show everything that is wrong with a masculine view of the world. And so Amabel is the alternative. And the historical character that Amabel is based on is a friend of Richardson's called Veronica Leslie Jones, who then went on to marry the character who is Michael Shatoff in Pilgrimage. I could go even further and tell you that for a while, they seem to all three live in a menage a trois um, certainly in the 1911 census they're all in the same house in London. So there's lots to say about that. In terms of Miriam's sexuality, I think what's interesting is she's not entirely comfortable in the heterosexual relationship. She's not entirely comfortable in a same -sex relationship. She seems to like to position herself between the two. And just as later with that menage a trois, I think it's really interesting that she goes to the opera with both Hypo and his wife, and it's that positioning yourself between the masculine and the feminine which is, I think, so much of what the ambiguity of the novel is about, what sexual identity actually is, and that's part of its radical nature, I think.

AMY: And for me, having only read this one sliver of the whole journey, I don't have enough, uh, information about all of this and her sexual identity and how she's really feeling about this woman. So to me, I kind of let that go and saw Amabel less literally as kind of a trigger for her to discover something bigger, you know? Um, it wasn't about the relationship so much as how she influenced her, I guess. 

KIM: It was like a spark lighting the next passage of her life or something like that.

AMY: And she sees, okay, so Amabel takes this piece of her soap, which is very intimate, writes on the mirror. And it's interesting, and Brad, I actually got this out of the discussion with your readers, but that she's looking in the mirror at herself when she sees that message, "I love you," which is amazing.

BRAD: Right.

AMY: Okay, so I want to read another passage from the book because I think it highlights her style , but it also sets the stage for the second half of the novel. And it was a passage that frustrated me because I had no idea what was going on for some of it. Uh, but let me just read it: 

The person who had stood for the first time alone upon the sunlit garden-path between the banks of flowers and watched them, through the pattern made by the bees sailing heavily across from bank to bank at the level of her face, and wondered at them all, flowers and bees and sunlight, at their all being there when nobody was about, and had looked for so long at the bright masses and now could re-see them with knowledge of their names and ways and of the dark earth underneath and still just as they were in that moment that had neither beginning nor end, this same person was now going, deceitfully, to local, social social Lycurgan meetings, frequenting them, since Oberland, only for small delights that were the prelude, the practice ground for more and more. This person, who was about to take a lover, presently, in time, at the right time, was the one who had gazed forever at the flower banks, unchanged.

And so first, after I catch my breath there, because that was only two Sentences, everything I read . Um, so she's talking about herself. And of course my mind did a double take when I read that line, "who was about to take a lover" because it's like, "oh, something's gonna 

be. Going on here, 

KIM: happened to me. It was like, ding. Okay, I saw that. Yeah.

AMY: So let's shift our focus onto this character Hypo AKA H.G. Wells, if you wanna read it that way, because in my mind, this book starts to get so good as their relationship comes into sharper focus. Brad, walk us through what happens between these two.

BRAD: Well first of all, Richardson started out, uh, and the Miriam character, having a relationship because she and H.G. Wells's wife or Hypo Wilson's wife were schoolmates together at this progressive school that I mentioned early on. But it's only as Miriam comes to spend time with the Wilsons that Hypo becomes attracted to her, kind of first intellectually and then, sexually, you might say. So the central drama in Dawn's Left Hand is really Hypo's campaign to entice Miriam into having an affair with him and Miriam's at best divided feelings throughout the whole experie.

AMY: Yes, I'm at best, divisive.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Downright hostile at times. Okay, so where they have their first tryst in this book, it's a private dining room that they have hired at a restaurant. I guess that was a thing. Uh, Richardson keeps having Miriam describe it as a shameful or a disgraceful room, so there's a degree of self-loathing about what she's doing with Hypo.

KIM: Yeah, they have such an odd dynamic in terms of conversation. They have this rapport and intimacy, but you can really sense that Miriam has disdain for him on some level. It's as if she sees through him completely and she has this very sharp insight into what really makes him tick. She writes of him: Having given her the chance of steering the conversation and waited, according to his own reckoning, for dark ages, in vain, he now resumed his usual role in any shared experience: conductor, perpetually defining. 

AMY: He always wants to be in charge. He always wants to lead the conversation. It's obnoxious and she sees it all, so it's completely scathing and I loved it. I think reading this book is worth it just for this relationship alone. All this Hypo stuff is so good, but I do have to laugh because one of the recurring things that always comes up in previous Lost Ladies of Lit episodes is this idea of women sometimes having to just listen to men wax on and on and on, and you just have to pretend you're fascinated.

KIM: And even more than that, to prop up the conversation for them and to make them look good.

AMY: And present company excepted, Brad and Scott, we're not talking about you. 

KIM: Definitely not. 

AMY: In your case, we are fascinated. Uh, but Richardson definitely has several classic moments in the book where she talks about Hypo as if he just is looking for a disciple. He's looking for a sounding board. She writes:

There was no place in his universe for women who did not either sincerely, blindly, follow, or play up and make him believe they were following. All the others were merely or unpleasant biological material. Wow. 

BRAD: There is no other work of literature which is so completely and unashamedly from a feminine perspective, giving no consolation to the male point of view. And in fact, she really often portrays men as sort of, uh, lesser beings from a sentient and emotional intelligence standpoint.

AMY: Yep. Yep. Girl preach. You know, um, she understands what he needs from her as a conversational partner, and so sometimes she gives it to him, but there's one point where she kind of messes with him and is like, No, I'm not finished yet. She sort of throws off the rules of their conversational game just to like get him to teeter a little bit. And I loved that moment.

KIM: Yeah.

BRAD: Absolutely

SCOTT: And you could almost say that Pilgrimage, all 13 volumes, is a, "This is what I wanted to say, but I didn't get the chance because I was talking to men like you."

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. I love that. Yeah. Even, the moment where they actually have their sexual encounter, that one in the restaurant, it ends very strangely and she spends the rest of the time trying to make him forget that that happened and making him feel better about it. 

BRAD: She is essentially trying to, uh, reassure Hypo that, you know, all is okay. 

AMY: It's 

KIM: Yeah, 

yeah. 

yeah. It's not your 

AMY: She's left having to be the one to try to make him feel better. 

Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: She does! It works!

AMY: Yeah.

SCOTT: I think it's one of the sort of comic moments in a way. I mean, you don't think this is a comic novel but when she looks at his naked body, thinks, 

AMY: Eh, 

Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. There's nothing really that great about him undressed. 

SCOTT: Right, yeah. Yeah, and that's partly his body. It's partly the male body, per se, I think, is not that impressive. But while we're on the sex scenes and let's face it, blink and you miss them. 

KIM: Uh-huh. Yeah, you're reading between the lines , too. You're like, hmm. Yeah. 

SCOTT: Exactly. But I mean, there is a moment, I think, where they do have sex early in the morning when he comes to her room. And I was really struck when I was reading the manuscript of Dawn's Left Hand, that she crosses a bit out. And that experience is quite painful in the manuscript, in the bit that she cuts out. Um, and even in what we've got, she describes a sudden descent into her clenched and rigid form and that then afterwards there's a kind of moment of dissociation. I find that quite disturbing actually.

KIM: It is disturbing. Yeah. Yeah.

AMY: You get the sense that it's just something she feels like she has to get out of the way. I just have to follow through on this and do it, not for him, but for me to be able to sort of move on or whatever. 

BRAD: Well, I think you're hitting on a key point, which is, you know, Miriam throughout Pilgrimage  she's kind of going through a whole series of situations where she tests to say, Does this work for me? She's like, trying on different ways of living in the world. She's gotta kind of check that box to say, I did try that and did it lift my being to a new level or not? Well, clearly for Miriam, it did not.

AMY: Yeah, she kept referring to their sex as our journeying. If that's journeying, it was like a bad trip.

KIM: Yeah, definitely a bad trip. Yeah. So relating that to Richardson and H.G. Wells, what else do we know about this affair between them in real life?

SCOTT: So the other documentation that we have is H.D. Wells's unofficial autobiography, which he didn't want published until after everybody who was involved had died. And he suggests in that that their sexual relationship was quite active, that they had sex outside in the heather. That it did last for a year. But also we know from H.G. Wells's life that he was a serial adulterer. Now he represented that as free love. And in Dawn's Left Hand, it's clear that Miriam also sees herself as a free lover. So this decision to have sex with him is partly a kind of philosophical one. She actually believes not in marriage, but that everybody should be free to have sex with whoever they want. But at the same time, of course, we see that given the nature of society at the time it's a deeply unequal social relationship, that he has far more freedom than she actually does. He felt, though, really aggrieved that she got much more critical praise than he did. Although he got the money, people wanted to buy his books, he was never celebrated as an innovator or a stylist in the way she was. And I think that's quite interesting that, you know, in some ways he looked up to her as a writer.

KIM: Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about Richardson's writing style and her command of language. And I mean that literally because she was proficient in a number of languages, right, Scott? 

SCOTT: Yes, absolutely. I think she had an incredible ear. I mean, she talks in Dawn's Left Hand about English pronunciation, the pronunciation of the different classes. It's also people who heard her speak said she had a kind of golden mellow voice that you could listen to forever. definitely all comes through in the writing. And if we go back to the passage that Amy picked out, that moment is what Richardson critics have called the Bee Memory. So it's Miriam's very first memory, of being in a garden. And it's the first time she really becomes aware of herself. So when she's saying, even though I'm about to take a lover and I'm an adult, I am the same person. I am experiencing the same reality, the same truth, as that small child who first became aware of herself. And the writing is an attempt to link those experiences across time. That's why it's so powerful, I think.

KIM: Yeah. It's so moving and powerful. Yep.

AMY: Yeah, and so my aha moment came when Miriam is reading a bunch of letters that she's gotten from Amabel. Amabel has a very distinct penmanship, which Miriam's eyes aren't accustomed to. It's not your run-of-the-mill, straightforward handwriting. She describes it as disjointed curves and gaps and carelessly dashed down under pressure feeling. And then Richardson writes, She gazed once more at the word on the page and saw that as written by the girl. It was not a word at all, it was a picture, a hieroglyph, every letter. in itself. Beautiful. Yes. And suggesting all its associations more powerfully than did the site of the word written closely.

And I was like, Oh my gosh. That's her writing style. It's the gaps. It's the disjointedness. It's the carelessly dashed down, it feels like, at times. But then, you don't look at it up close, you look at it standing back a little bit, and then it's beautiful. And once I got to that passage, I just had a totally new relationship with this book. 

SCOTT: I think that's absolutely right. And you know, Richardson talks about what she wanted to do was not sort of have the reader as somebody who sat there as a passive recipient of the text, but she wanted a collaboration, that she thought the work of literature should be a collaboration between the writer and the reader. Now in order to do that, you have to leave gaps. You have to have inconsistencies, you have to have a sense of incompleteness. Otherwise the reader has nowhere that they can insert themselves. And I think when it works well, that's exactly what happens with her text. But she was also terribly self-critical, you know. She was always feeling that she hadn't quite achieved that style, that allowed that collaboration. So she used to write, IR in the margin of her manuscripts, meaning imperfectly realized. I haven't quite got that right. Um, and she was always trying to, to do it better and to do it differently, which creates a kind of inconsistency, which some editors of critics have seen as a fault. But I think it's just because she was always experimenting, she was always trying to do it differently, better, get exactly the right effect.

KIM: So her work is often compared to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Also, it's been argued that it's like Henry James, which I can definitely see that. But I feel like there's more freedom to her work. What are your thoughts on, I guess, what her influences might be?

SCOTT: I think James, definitely. Charlotte Bronte. I mean, she's not impressed by that many women novelists, but Bronte is absolutely there. And the first volume of Pilgrimage is really a rewriting of Villette in lots of ways. She's very funny about Henry James. I mean, she does love Henry James. The point where she parts company with him is the way he represents women, which she just finds is completely artificial and unreal. But she talks in one letter about Henry James being in the ocean. So there's this idea of immersion, but he's in a tank and she says the tank is the middle class drawing room. He sees the ocean always from the perspective of the drawing room. And the implication is that what I want to do is get out of that tank and get into the water, totally immerse myself, and then we'll see what happens.

KIM: I think that completely makes sense. Um, he's like looking at it like as if it were a statue in front of him or a model almost. But she is like, it is the real human being right here and I'm gonna talk about that. There's something more real and fleshy about her work And more free. 

SCOTT: Maybe one of the things we forget about the late Victorian period is just how many women writers there were. There was a whole sort of genre of fiction called New Women Fiction. There were women writers writing about the possibility of living an unmarried life, but it always had to be represented as scandalous in some way. The extraordinary thing about Richardson is she makes being a single woman and independence completely ordinary, even boring at times, you know, because she's interested in exploring the boredom of being on your own. And thinking about boredom is actually quite an interesting thing to do.

AMY: So, Scott, Is that one of the reasons... i, I guess I'm trying to figure out why did she fall off the radar and then how and why did she start to reemerge from the shadows? Because it seems like there's more scholarship on her work happening today. Why is she now being recognized as important and what happened to make her disappear?

SCOTT: It's a really good question. Um, I mean, I think it's partly biographical. She didn't have a great deal of money. After the First World War, she got married and she started to divide her life between summers in London and winters in Cornwall because her husband had suspected tuberculosis, so she didn't have the financial means, nor was she particularly keen on putting herself out and about on the literacy scene. She was certainly out and about in the 1920s, but by the 1930s, after the financial crash, she was fairly withdrawn. The novels never really sold. And the gaps between each one coming out became longer and longer, so people didn't realize that this was a series. And partly it's to do with the way in which modernist literature got institutionalized in the universities after the Second World War. And it was a bunch of men, British and American, and they weren't that interested in Dorothy Richardson. One pretty important critic said to me, and he wrote his first book on Dorothy Richardson, he said, Well, I was just practicing really to write on Joyce. So . I was

like, 

That's, 

KIM: wow. 

SCOTT: I think that's how it's been viewed. But even now, Pilgrimage presents a problem. It's difficult to teach because students, you know, have difficulty getting hold of good student copies. There's a couple of good Broadview editions published by a Canadian publisher. And the big edition that I'm involved in, um, I'm afraid it's not finished yet. It's a scholarly edition so it's very expensive. But once we've got that out, we will then be able to produce paperbacks, which will be better available. 

AMY: I mean, Ulysses is a big book to dive into too, but it's one book at least, you know? You can accomplish it. Whereas when Brad pitched it to us, we were like 13 books?! No. We can't do that. But now I wanna go back and do 'em, so, um, yeah.

KIM: So speaking of that, you have this online course where it's a group reading of the Pilgrimage series in full over several months time, and I think that's still ongoing, right?

BRAD: Right. Yeah. We've been going essentially month by month, book by book, and it's been very rewarding for me personally to discover what others bring to that experience in terms of perceptions and interpretations. And I think this is definitely, number one, it is such a big book. You really do wanna pause repeatedly and bounce ideas and ask questions. And every one of those discussions, I see things that I completely missed and I hope other people have that same experience because, that's one of the ways you know you're dealing with a classic text. It doesn't offer itself up on a platter one time and you've essentially consumed the meal like a fast food.

AMY: And so it's actually too late for our listeners to, they've kind of missed the boat of joining this group, but you can go back and watch the recorded sessions, 

BRAD: right. So the site is set up so that you can start at any point and go through book by book and you'll find things to kind of help you through the book in terms of what the plot is and who are the characters. And then also the videos where we have the discussions, they'll be there all the time. 

AMY: I think having you guys here today to help talk us through it has really been helpful. It has definitely enticed me to wanna go back and read the earlier books in the series. Just have to find time now. But I think Brad, like you said, take it a chunk at a time. Maybe one every two months or something like that. They're not long books. What do you think, Kim?

KIM: Yeah, I'm in for it. Let's do it together. We can talk about it and then we can have a t-shirt or something that we could, you know, wear saying I read all 13 volumes of Dorothy 

AMY: Yeah, bragging rights. We did it. 

Yeah, If anybody wants to participate, maybe we could do a little button style pin that we can mail out to anybody that has actually accomplished it. 

BRAD: That's a great idea. I mean, it is something that it's worth encouraging folks to, to assault Mount Pilgrimage, essentially.

KIM: I love it. I love it.

AMY: The Everest of literature. Yeah.

KIM: This was a wonderful discussion. I feel like I got so much out of it, so thank you both. 

SCOTT: Thank you all for inviting me. I love what you're doing with the podcast. I think it's a fantastic idea and it really works. 

BRAD: Let's face it, Dorothy Richardson is a lost lady of lit. Uh, unfortunately, I wish that wasn't the case, but if you go out and look for her and open up and engage with her work, it just brings so much back.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. For show notes and more information, visit us at lostladiesoflit.com and be sure to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Those reviews really help new listeners find us.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.