Dorothy richardson biography

Biography

by Anthony Domestico

Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), now largely ignored but once regarded as one of the most important of modernist novelists, was a pionjär of the stream-of-consciousness technique.  Her thirteen-novel project, Pilgrimage, is a prime example of modernism at its finest and most maddening: dilatory in its pacing, challenging in its form eller gestalt, and concerned above all else with the faithful representation of the (oftentimes dull) whims of everyday consciousness.

Richardson was born in Abington, Oxfordshire in 1873.  Due to her family’s financial difficulties, she was forced to find employment at the age of 17, working as a governess and then later as a dental assistant.  This experience would provide fodder for Richardson’s depiction of her heroine’s ventures into the working world in Pilgrimage.

While in London working at a dental office, Richardson came into contact with a number of literary and cultural figures.  She began writing freelance for the

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Dorothy Richardson

Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 – 17 June 1957) was a British novelist and journalist.

Richardson was born in 1873. At first she went to a private school for girls. But in 1890 she had to leave school because her father had money trouble. After that she worked at some teaching jobs in Germany and London. She took care of her mother who suffered from depression and killed herself in 1895.^[1][2]

Richardson became a secretary in a dentist's office and lived in Bloomsbury. She met the writer H. G. Wells and they began an affair. This led to pregnancy and a miscarriage. In 1908 she left London and moved to a farm that was owned by a Quaker friend. In 1914 she wrote two books about Quakers.^[1]

From 1908 to 1912, she wrote for The Saturday Review. In 1912 she started writing Pointed Roofs. This novel was the first of thirteen books that became the group called Pilgrimage. In 1917 Richardson married a young artist, Alan

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Dorothy Richardson 1873 – 1957

Dorothy Richardson's Life

Dorothy Richardson was born into a middle-class family in the small town of Abingdon, just south of Oxford. Her father lost most of his money when she was teenager and the family moved to London, where she attended a progressive school influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin. At seventeen, when the family’s financial situation deteriorated further, she went to work as a teacher in Germany, then as governess and teacher in England and eventually as a receptionist in a dental surgery in Harley Street. While working in London in 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson lived in lodgings in Bloomsbury and associated with writers, political radicals, and European exiles. Several of the men and women she had relationships with at this time figure in her long prose work, Pilgrimage: for example, Benjamin Grad (Michael Shatov in Pilgrimage), Veronica Leslie Jones (Amabel) and H.G. Wells (Hypo Wilson). Her affair with Wells resulted i