Dorothy Richardson

Dorothy Miller Richardson (born May 17, 1873 in Abingdon , Oxfordshire , † June 17, 1957 in Beckenham , Kent ) was a British writer and essayist . She was the first English-language author who a novel in the narrative technique of stream of consciousness ( " stream of consciousness released"). Her twelve-part novel cycle Pilgrimage ("Pilgrimage") is one of the masterpieces of innovative women's literature in modern English literature . Although her extensive work is comparable to James Joyce or Virginia Woolf , it has received less attention.

Life

Dorothy Richardson was born into a posh but impoverished family. Already at the age of seventeen she had to pay for her own living and from 1890 worked as a governess and teacher, first in Hanover and later in north London , where she began to write her first texts and made the first drafts for what would later become her main work. Eventually she returned to her family's English country house. In 1895 her mother committed suicide, which led to the complete dissolution of the family. Richardson went back to London where she accepted jobs as a secretary and a dental assistant.

In London she sought contact with the avant-garde socialist movement that was currently popular and found connections in literary circles such as the Bloomsbury Group . In the following years she worked as a translator and wrote her first essays as a freelance journalist , finally she gave up her job as a secretary and began to join the bohemian community . In 1917 she married the much younger illustrator, artist and bohemian Alan Odle . The couple spent the winter months in Cornwall until Odle's death in 1948 and lived in London during the summer. Dorothy M. Richardson died one month after her 84th birthday in Beckenham, Kent.

plant

Dorothy Richardson has published numerous essays, poems, short stories and novels , and she has also written skits and journalistic texts. Her main work, however, is the autobiographically based novel cycle Pilgrimage , which she began in 1915 with the work Pointed Roofs (German: "The shadows of the gables"). In Pointed Roofs she used the narrative attitude of the inner monologue for the first time and thus "invented" the completely new narrative technique of the stream of consciousness of the characters in the novel before Joyce and Woolf . Although she herself rejected the term introduced by the literary critic May Sinclair in the introduction to the book Pointed Roofs , the term stream of consciousness quickly found its way into modern narrative theory and soon became the tried and tested stylistic device of the new experimental and psychological novel in English narrative literature of the 1920s Years. Richardson's debut work was received ambivalently or ignored by the critics: the appreciation of her newly developed narrative technique was subject to the literary polemic that Richardson expressed her admiration for German culture at a time when Great Britain and the German Empire were at war .

The autobiographical main character of the novel cycle is 17-year-old Miriam Henderson, who comes from the English middle class , who has to earn a living on her own and first becomes a teacher in a North German boarding school for girls, then returns to England to live a self-determined life in the midst of To lead intellectuals and free thinkers. The novel series takes place in the period from 1890 to around 1915. Richardson avoids any comment from a “superordinate narrator” and uses an internal monologue in chains of associations to describe the events from Miriam's point of view as an uninterrupted flow of perceptions.

reception

Dorothy Richardson's cycle of novels contains essential feminist ideas with regard to the emancipatory orientation of her protagonist (s) in post-Victorian England and prepares important aspects of modern women's literature , which at the same time has a high documentary value for the women's movement , which was not always appreciated. However, the author was less concerned with addressing the issue of equal rights for women than with the more differentiated relationship between women and reality, which is perceived more intuitively and sensually than the rational consciousness of men determined by intellectual action. As Richardson's weakness, interpreters of their work cite the enormous scope, which prepares the plot for the reader for too long and ultimately loses the suspense . In contrast to the more concise works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Richardson used the possibilities of the newly acquired narrative technique less specifically, which is why it was more an end in itself.

Publications

• Pointed Roofs. Pilgrimage. A novel. Introduction by May Sinclair, Duckworth & Co., London 1915, OCLC 776333381 ; reissued: New York, NY 1919.
  • German translation by Clara Munk: Die Schatten der Giebel , Mühlbach & Huck, Seligenstadt 1993, ISBN 3-929779-21-8 ( OCLC 180485710 ).
• Backwater . London 1916
• Honeycomb . London 1917
• The tunnel . London / New York, NY 1919
• The wheel rushes , a story from the life of American workers, translated by Werner Peter Larsen, A. Kaden, Dresden 1919, DNB 573878196 , OCLC 72023296 .
• Interim . London 1919
• Deadlock . London 1921
• Revolving lights . London 1923
• The trap . London 1925
• Oberland . New York 1928
• Dawn's Left Hand . London 1931
• Clear Horizon . London 1935
• Dimple Hill . London 1938
• Pilgrimage . 4 volumes; Introduction by W. Allen, London / New York, NY 1967

Secondary literature

• María Francisca Llantada Díaz: Form and meaning in Dorothy M. Richardson's Pilgrimage . Winter, Heidelberg, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8253-5363-6 (English)
• Joanne Winning: The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson . University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, ISBN 0-299-17034-9 (English)
• Elisabeth Bronfen : The literary space. An investigation using the example of Dorothy M. Richardson's Pilgrimage (= Studies in English Philology NF, Volume 25). Niemeyer Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-484-45025-8 (dissertation University of Munich 1985, 373 pages).
  • Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text . Manchester University Press, Manchester, New York, NY 1999, ISBN 0-7190-4808-7 (English translation)
• Heike Wagner: Representation of women and narrative structure in Dorothy Richardson's novels . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-631-49732-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Dorothy Richardson in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Manfred Pfister, Jerôme von Gebsattel: Major works of English literature - individual representations and interpretations . Kindler, Munich 1975, pp. 449f