The Ultimate Astonisher: Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage"

Abstract

It is by now a commonplace that feminist scholars, responding to the call to expose these half-truths, have been re-opening the doors of modernist literary history in order to admit women writers into a canon that has for too long excluded them. Virginia L. Smyers stresses that women, including Dorothy Richardson, Bryher, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Mary Butts, Frances Gregg, Marianne Moore, May Sinclair, Amy Lowell, Harriett Weaver, Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy, not a sidelight of the literary production of the period; they were as much a part of it as Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. That the men's names have emerged since as the stars might have much to do with the perceptions of the predominantly male critics.2 The accuracy of this statement can be measured by focussing on the fate of one of these women: Dorothy Richardson. Between 1915 and 1938, twelve novels what Richardson called chapter-volumes of Pilgrimage were published; March Moonlight, the thirteenth volume, was published posthumously in 1967.3 Concentrating entirely on the consciousness of its protagonist Miriam Henderson, this work mirrors Richardson's life from 1891 to 1913. It begins with Miriam leaving her parents' home in England, at age 17, to work as a teacher in a German school. After six months in Hanover, she accepts a teaching post in North London. Following her mother's suicide in