Dorothy Richardson (3)

The work of Dorothy Richardson is significant in the development of the modern British and Irish novel. Like Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf---though her talent was less than theirs---she was one of the first to write in the stream-of-consciousness manner, although she hated this mostrar más term. Her autobiographical novel, in 12 book-length "chapters," had enjoyed few recent readers until the posthumous discovery and publication of a thirteenth section, March Moonlight, in 1967, aroused new interest and brought fresh evaluations of her work. Although she displayed astonishing self-perceptions, most critics find her writing flawed by its egotistical tone and by her unpoetic, humorless style. The fact that she was treated like a son by her father perhaps explains the strong feminist orientation of her life (and of Pilgrimage, 1915--38) and her general distrust of men. She gloried in loneliness and independence in a day when these were difficult for women, but tempered these virtues with love affairs both lesbian and heterosexual. She was briefly a mistress of H. G. Wells (who is portrayed as "Hypo" in Pilgrimage), an affair that ended in pregnancy and miscarriage, and eventually married an artist, Alan Odle, in 1917. Disdaining "plot," Pilgrimage runs to 2,210 pages, and some of it is heavy going, largely because it lacks selectivity and intensity. Richardson was "hopelessly vague" about her birth date, says Horace Gregory, but on her gravestone (which contains an error in her name), it is given as May 17, 1873. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos