Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage is a novel sequence by the British author Dorothy Richardson, from the first half of the 20th century. It comprises 13 volumes, including a final posthumous volume. It is now considered a significant work of literary modernism. Richardson's own term for the volumes was "chapters". Overview Miriam Henderson, the central character in the Pilgrimage novel sequence, is based on the author's own life between 1891 and 1915. Pilgrimage was read as a work of fiction and "its critics did not suspect that its content was a reshaping of DMR's own experience", nor that it was a roman à clef. Miriam, like Richardson, "is the third of four daughters [whose] parents had longed for a boy and had treated her as if she fulfilled that expectation". This upbringing is reflected in Miriam's "strong ambivalence toward her role as a woman". Dorothy Richardson had the same ambivalence. Content The first novel Pointed Roofs (1915), is set in 1893. At 17 years old Miriam Henderson, as Richardson herself did, teaches English at a finishing school in Hanover, Germany. Both author and character have to do this because of their father's financial problems. The following year, 1916, Richardson published Backwater, where Miriam "works as resident governess in a school frequented by the daughters of the North London middle class".