Pilgrimage Volume I

Volume I of IV in the first U.S. edition in 50 years of Dorothy Richardson's challenging, insightful modernist classic, Pilgrimage . First published in 13 separate "chapter-volumes" between 1915 and 1967, Pilgrimage is unique in English literature. Unique in its length, the closest challenger to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Unique in its prose, the first to which the term "stream of consciousness" was applied (and a term Richardson herself despised). Unique in its unapologetic insistence in showing us the world as seen through the eyes of Richardson's protagonist, Miriam Henderson, and Miriam alone. Unique in its embrace of a feminism rooted in Richardson's uncompromising belief that women have ideas, emotions, and rights not just equal to those of men but far less encumbered by the baggage of customs and manners.

As the novelist Jonathan Coe wrote of his first encounter with Pilgrimage, "Whether 'feminine' or not, the rhythms of Richardson's prose are unique, and when I began reading Pointed Roofs [the first chapter-volume] I had certainly not come across anything like them. As a critic for the avant garde film magazine Close Up, she was acutely sensitive to the potency of the moving image, and much of the descriptive writing in Pilgrimage consists of flickering, transient, seemingly random images, cut together to form montages that somehow carry an unexpected rightness."

Louise Bogan, former Poet Laureate of the U.S., wrote of Richardson's perspective, "All this is feminine. It is feminine 'reality' she is after; and she soon finds that this reality can be most tellingly presented in a condensed, episodic form. She is not recounting it to us retrospectively; she is sharing it with us in a kind of continuous present Not this is the way it was, but this is the way it is."

This edition is faithful to texts of the individual first editions of Pilgrimage's chapter-volumes and corrects numerous errors and amendments made in the 1938, 1967, and Virago Modern Classics editions. This is the closest thing to an accurate text of Pilgrimage until the Oxford Uniform Edition of the Works of Dorothy Richardson is completed years from now. It includes helpful synopses of each book and useful annotations absent from previous editions.