Pilgrimage was published as thirteen separate novels over a period of twenty years, but it's clearly meant to be read as a single work, in the same sort of way as À la recherche du temps perdu — Proust was two years older than Richardson, and oddly enough the first part of his book came out just two years before hers. In a preface written with hindsight in 1938, Richardson, with typical perversity, traces the ancestry of her project to the great realists, Balzac and Arnold Bennett. But she does also admit that there is an important parallel to what she is doing in Proust, and also cites Henry James as an important influence. But none of these, evidently, gave her a pattern for "a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism" (oddly, she doesn't mention the Brontës — too obvious to name, perhaps?). And neither did Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, the obvious parallels we would think of: they hadn't got going yet. A hint of D.H. Lawrence might have been in there somewhere, but he was ten years younger and only just getting going as well.

To all intents and purposes, Richardson was beating her own path into modernism, and it's an astonishingly straight and narrow one. However experimental and unregulated her syntax is, there's a rod of iron ruling the narrative structure. She never steps outside the head of her fictitious alter ego, Miriam, and she tells us about Miriam's perceptions of the world and her thoughts and experiences strictly in the order in which they enter her head. It's a stream of consciousness without any eddies or whirlpools. Unlike Proust, she never takes advantage of the 25-year gap between experience and writing to comment or analyse or fill in background details. She selects, of course, and we know it's a trick, but it often really feels as though you're looking at the world from the point of view of a teenager in the nineties and you don't know what's coming next.

1. Pointed Roofs (1915): It's early in 1891, and seventeen-year-old Miriam is off to Germany to work as an English assistant in Fräulein Pfaff's school for young ladies in Hanover. The school turns out to be everything but a serious educational establishment: there are only ten pupils, most of them about the same age as Miriam, and the only other staff member is "Mademoiselle", a French protestant teenager who seems to be almost as much out of her depth as Miriam. It's all rather closer to Villette than to Mädchen in Uniform, but Miriam doesn't quite fall for either the professor or the clingy younger girl.

Fräulein Pfaff decides capriciously when she gets up in the morning what the school is going to do that day — housekeeping, walks, excursions, an improvised concert — and Miriam is only rarely called on actually to teach. It's a pleasant life, but it peters out after the end of the first term, since Miriam doesn't have enough money to support herself in Germany through the holidays, and has to go home to her parents and sisters in Barnes.

2. Backwater (1916): Miriam has found a job nearer to home, in a school in North London. Not as much fun as Germany, and coming from Surrey she looks on Finsbury Park as practically the Arctic Circle, but it's a better-organised school and she likes her employers and builds up a bit of confidence in her teaching abilities. In between times, there's still her sisters' world of tennis clubs, dances, boating on the Thames and trips to the seaside, and the young men that go with all that. They still don't seem to be as important to Miriam as her life in the school, but she is beginning to notice them a bit more...

3. Honeycomb (1917): It's now early 1895 and the family finances have taken another turn for the worse, so Miriam has had to take a better-paid job, and is now governess to the children of a wealthy family somewhere in the Home Counties. She enjoys being on the fringe of the carefree late-Victorian country house life, but the Oscar Wilde trial is rumbling on in the background, and there are a lot of offstage worries in her own family — her father heading for bankruptcy, her mother seriously ill, and two of her sisters on the point of marrying. And it's all that that eventually forces her to give up the pleasant job at Newlands. ( )

Pilgrimage I encompasses the first three novels in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, 13 novels in four books. After I finished this volume, I read the introduction and foreword and gained a better understanding of why this work is important. I knew that it was one of the first works to use stream of consciousness; I didn't realize that although Richardson bills this as fiction, it closely follows her own life between 1891 and 1915.

The first novel, Pointed Roofs, has Miriam Henderson going to Germany to teach English in a school there. The second novel, Backwater, was pretty bleak - Miriam comes home and takes a job as a teacher which she doesn't like. She looks for another opportunity, and towards the end of the novel she is confident enough to leave the job at the school. Also her family is having financial difficulties; her father has to sell their home to help pay for her mother's care.

The third novel, Honeycomb, has Miriam going to work as a governess for a rich family in the country. Her two sisters get married. By reading the introduction and some other background information, I figured out that Miriam's mom passes away at the end of Honeycomb, but it's not that clear.

Reading this book was a bit of a slog; it was a slow as you might expect when stream of consciousness is used - everything Miriam sees and feels are described. I understand the importance of it, and reading Richardson's own foreword is helpful.

I'm committing to read all of Pilgrimage, so three more books and ten more novels to go! ( )

The first 3 chapters of Miriam's life which parallels the author's own life. Spend a lot of time with Miriam's thoughts this one is considered one of the first SOC books. I am not enamored with Miriam, I find her to be pretentious, judging and superficial. ( )

This is a 13 part 2000 page semi-autobiographical novel told completely from the protagonist, Miriam's, point of view. Richardson is viewed as the first author (before Proust or Woolf) to attempt a stream of consciousness style. Her book didn't really catch as much attention as some think it should have considering the innovative style. One reason for that may have been that publishing a pro-German book in England 1915 just wasn't going to go over well.

Pointed Roofs introduces us to a young Miriam. She is seventeen and her family has fallen on hard times financially, so she decides to go to Germany as a governess to earn her keep. She ends up in a situation where she is living with a handful of other girls in a boardinghouse and she is responsible for teaching English. This mainly seems to consist of her listening to the German girls read in English and conversing with them in English. In between we hear Miriam's thoughts about living with so many women (not fun), wondering about her family back in England, cultural observations about Germany, and her lack of teaching skills.

I like Miriam. She seems to be the sort of person that is hard to get along with. She's sort of stand-offish and opinionated and not one to open up. But her voice and observations strike me as honest and authentic and I'm enjoying getting to know her.

Backwater is the second part of the 13 that make up her book, Pilgrimage. In this part, Miriam has come back to England after being a governess in a German school for young women. Now she is teaching in a school for younger girls, hired by the Misses Perne, two sisters. Miriam thinks about many topics that a teenage girl would - attraction to young men and feeling attractive to them, ideas about religion, reading novels late at night. She also finds out her mother needs surgery and their family can no longer afford the nice house they've been living in. So she needs to find a job that pays more than her current one. She resigns from her job and hopes to find a job as live-in governess to a wealthy family.

I liked this installment even more than the first. I'm getting used to Richardson's writing and finding a lot of insight and beauty in it. Looking forward to continuing on.

Honeycomb is the third volume in Richardson's Pilgrimage series. In this, Miriam attempts to make more money by being a governess in the wealthy home of the Corries. She is just responsible for the Corrie children and in her considerable free time, she reads, ponders life, and is introduced to the scandalous society of the Corries. She meets divorced couples and hears about Oscar Wilde and his trial for homosexuality. So her world seems both wider and smaller in this volume as she is introduced to a wider berth of society but is also confined to a country house.

I'm finding it interesting to think about her different teaching circumstances so far - in Germany as a companion to speak English with girls basically her age, in England at a boarding school with middle class girls, and now at an English estate with only one family of children. Her interactions with the outside world differs greatly in these three situations and of course the teaching itself is different as well.

In this novel, I felt like I lost Miriam's voice a little when she got so involved with thinking about the Corries and their friends. But then the last section completely turned that around. She goes home for the summer and two of her sisters marry and then she spends time at a seaside resort with her mother. In this section, Miriam's voice felt strong, authentic, and honest again to me.

I've now finished what is generally grouped as the first volume of this four volume/13 novel work. I'm very much enjoying it and I'm glad to have started this as my project for the year. ( )

Pointed Roofs:
(Have always had, not sure when I got it, nothing written in the front!)

The first in her Pilgrimage series and I was glad to see when feeling a little trepidation that it’s the longest of the three in the first volume. But actually, my trepidation at approaching what was basically one of the first truly Modernist, stream-of-consciousness novels, and definitely the first written from a female perspective was misplaced, as it was actually not that hard to read, just being the interior monologue of Miriam, one of four sisters and 17 when we meet her, who goes to Germany to take up a position as an English Assistant at a school for English and German young ladies.

We do see everything through her eyes – confusions, gossip, scandal, and her impressions of her fellow residents have an almost Cubist aspect as we catch sight of them from different angles and in different situations, but it’s really not that much different from any novel which concentrates on the viewpoint of a single main character. Harder than the language and style, which really don’t seem THAT experimental nowadays, though were obviously ground-breaking at the time, was the amount of phrases in German, which were often but not always translated, and certainly not immediately (there was quite a lot of French, too, but I can read French OK). Hopefully this will diminish in the books set back in England.

It’s similar to one of the Whipples (was it?) in that – without scandal – Miriam is rather suddenly on her way home at the end of the book, as we leave this interesting, rich, absorbing and intriguing book – in my case, very much wanting to know more.

This book would suit … Anyone interested in women’s, experimental or stream of consciousness writing, Virago and Persephone fans

Backwater:
The second book in Richardson’s Pilgrimage series, which I’m reading alongside a few blogger friends this year, and Miriam has left Germany and is interviewed for a position at a school in North London. Again, the characters she meets are shown obliquely and entirely from her viewpoint. As an aside, I described this as being “Cubist” in my last Richardson review, and was pleased (OK, a bit smug) to read in the introduction to “Mrs Dalloway” Woolf’s technique being described in the same way.

Anyway, this technique has started to remind me a bit of when I was studying linguistics, and was introduced to the idea that people talking face-to-face hardly ever use nouns. Think about it – if you’re dress shopping, you’ll go, “I like that one, what about the blue one, oh, this is nice, let’s try these on”. Then the listener must try to piece together what’s being talked about, especially if they’re analysing a tape of the discussion without the context. Following Miriam’s thought processes, preoccupations and discussions, we lose track of people then find them again way later: for example, early on, she meets a man during the holidays, then we get absorbed in the world of school again, and it’s only much later that we obliquely hear what happened to their relationship – because Richardson selects rather than giving everything, and the selection is almost random, as one’s own thought processes tend to be.

Miriam is growing up in this book, but she odes seem like a mardy teenager in places, for example when she’s on holiday with two sisters and a prospective brother-in-law and finds the other holiday-makers’ perfectly normal plans “silly” in the extreme, but then engages in some sort of slightly desulatory flirtation with a man they meet, or using slang terms in front of her older, staid employers. She is given more responsibility than she was in Germany, and her interactions with her acolyte / admirer (who is actually more natural with the pupils than she is) highlight the gap between perception and reality (opening up interesting ideas about how our perception of her life through her eyes might relate to reality).

The book ends on another point of change for the characters and I look forward to the next volume. Why did I think this was so difficult and put off reading it?