When looking at the modernist canon, the innovators that tower above all others are inevitably James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Virginia Woolf is grudgingly also granted a place, less for her innovation than for her femininely aestheticized version of the modernist novel. But, as Gertrude Stein furtively asked, “Who came first?” Why is it that most students at university today are unaware that Gertrude Stein published her Three Lives in 1909, that “Pointed Roofs”, the first chapter of Dorothy Richardson’s epic novel Pilgrimage, came out in 1915 and May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier was published in 1919? All incredibly innovative–and truly modernist–yet published long before Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Why are these works not on every syllabus, to be compared to the male modernist tradition? Why are they not even mentioned? This neglect is undeniably a legacy left by male critics of modernism, with T. S. Eliot at the forefront, declaring that Joyce had “killed the nineteenth century novel” and had thus left nothing more to be accomplished. The one-sided, often contradictory, and potentially inconclusive critical reception of Dorothy Richardson by reviewers is the key to why she and other first generation feminists remain in obscurity.
Dorothy Richardson was born in 1873 in Abingdon, Berkshire. In her late teens she worked as a teacher and governess, first in Hanover, Germany and later in North London and the Home Counties. In 1896 she moved to Bloomsbury to work as a dental receptionist, gradually entering intellectual circles and beginning to write. She had a brief affair with H.G. Wells and in 1912 she began work on “Pointed Roofs”, the first ‘chapter’ in her novel Pilgrimage. Written in what became known as ’stream of consciousness,’ the novel records with an obsessive eye for detail and nuance the life of a young woman, Miriam Henderson, from the 1890s until the outbreak of World War I. Richardson continued writing Pilgrimage until 1954 and published twelve chapters, each released as a separate book. The novel in its entirety spans well over two thousand pages. She died in 1957 and her last and unfinished chapter March Moonlight was published posthumously in 1967.
Richardson argued in both her fiction and her essays that women throughout history have been “hampered by the human demand”–an idea also formulated by Woolf in her essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Both Richardson and Woolf argued that Western civilization is essentially patriarchal and women have been prevented from realising their creative potential by the constraints that society puts on them. Richardson pointed out that not only have women been deprived of freedom of detachment from social duties–what she calls freedom from human demand–which male artists enjoy in order to create art, but furthermore that the criteria for ‘great art’ have themselves been set in a masculine, patriarchal tradition. First generation feminists had to find and define a feminine identity while defending it against male criticism.
Richardson’s aim, both in her feminist theory and her writing, was to create an alternative to the male grasp of the universe, which to her constantly imposed structures onto both theory and art. In her ‘Foreword to Pilgrimage’ she states that she categorically set out to “produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” since she believed the linear prose of such modernist authors as Proust could never truly capture the feminine psyche. Her radical experiments range from the syntactical, “feminine prose should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without obstructions” to the formal, her greatest innovation being the ’stream-of-consciousness’–ironically a description she herself hated and called a “lamentably ill-chosen metaphor.” In her essay, Novels, she wrote that “no authority of whatever eminence, would succeed in persuading her to regard consciousness as a stream.” With her unconventional narrative structure–a non-linear, non-hierarchical and de-centring plot of over two thousand pages–she formed a way of writing what she perceived as the feminine, and in doing so subverted traditional and inherently masculine modes of writing.
While most critics recognise her work as pioneering in both feminist and psychological fiction, the criticism against Richardson has for a long time been far greater than the praise she is granted. In masculine as well as feminist readings, critics often limit themselves to very narrow readings, while different feminist camps have tried to read a single brand of feminism into her works, often clashing in their claims as to which Richardson advocates. Often they forget that Richardson herself–mirrored in Pilgrimage’s heroine Miriam–smoothly moved between different spheres of political and feminist opinion, often within a matter of a few years.
Since the early 1980s there has been renewed interest in Richardson and her works, but the earlier and more polemical charges of “inconsequence, dullness, obscurity and formlessness” often overshadow a more balanced critical discussion. Her experimental mode of writing had a single aim: to discover the best way of expressing one particular kind of sensibility–the feminine. In doing so, she successfully created a new and uniquely feminist way of writing, anticipating many later feminist theories. Richardson herself would no doubt not have been too distressed by the unengaged polemics of her detractors; in her essay ‘Women & the Future’ she describes woman as “relatively indifferent to the fashions of men, to the momentary philosophies, […] valuing them only in so far as she is aware of their importance in the evolution.” Especially in this post-feminist age, Richardson and her feminist contemporaries Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and May Sinclair should figure much more prominently in the modernist canon in schools and universities today. Only there will they continue to generate vital questions about gender and identity, which have of late become obscured, as well as questions of aesthetics and technique, for too long exclusively granted to Joyce and his male peers.

Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage is published by Virago and is available in the J. B. Morrell Library.