‘The novel is going to rediscover itself’: Dorothy Richardson, The Freewoman, and Individual Expression

Abstract

This article examines Dorothy Richardson’s engagement with The Freewoman’s discussion of women’s individuality. Of Marsden’s three periodicals, The Freewoman, the New Freewoman, and The Egoist, it is her final periodical that is best associated with Richardson’s work. It was in The Egoist that May Sinclair published her influential review of Richardson, which referred to Richardson’s style as ‘stream of consciousness’. However, Richardson’s most engaged interaction with the Marsden periodicals was actually The Freewoman. Indeed, Richardson’s Pilgrimage series represents a literary example of the periodical’s call for a new type of literature that depicts the individual’s unfiltered and uncensored thoughts.