Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery

Biographical-critical study. "In purpose as well as style [DMR] was an innovator [for] she had no inhibitions about going against...the currents of her time." Pilgrimage, furthermore, "is closer to the art of autobiography than to fiction." Its personal roots lie deep in her own life, while its "literary roots are decisively English, and are to be found in the writings of Charlotte Bronte." One also cannot ignore the "practical and personal as well as literary" influence of H.G. Wells on DMR, but she "moved far beyond the example Wells provided (of "a conversational style," "the…use of a realistic eye and ear," "mimicry, and of the novel as a means of furthering advanced' ideas"), in that "she created a world of her won beyond the frontiers of the conventional novel, [and] in the writing of Pilgrimage, she contributed to the overthrow of fictional clichés."