Dorothy M Richardson

Dorothy M. Richardson 1882-1957, English novelist. Her important work is Pilgrimage (12 vol., 1915-38; omnibus ed. 1938), a novel that records in great detail the inner experience of one woman. In constructing the English novel as a series of images running through the mind of a character, Richardson prefigured Joyce and Woolf. She preferred the label "interior monologue" to stream of consciousness for her work.

Bibliography: See biography by J. Rosenberg (1973); studies by C. R. Blake (1960) and H. Gregory (1967).

Richardson, Dorothy Miller (1873–1957), novelist, became an intimate friend of H. G. Wells and other avant-garde thinkers of the day who encouraged her to write. Pointed Roofs (1915) was the first of a sequence of highly autobiographical novels entitled Pilgrimage, of which the last volume is March Moonlight (1967). She was a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique, narrating the action through the mind of her heroine Miriam. She believed in ‘unpunctuated’ female prose (citing Joyce in support), and V. Woolf credited her with inventing ‘the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’.

The formidable length of her great work deterred many readers, but interest revived in the 1960s and 1970s with the growth of feminist criticism.