The crossing was over. They were arriving. The movement of the little steamer that had collected the passengers from the packet-boat drove the raw air against Miriam’s face. In her tired brain the grey river and the flat misty shores slid constantly into a vision of the gaslit dining-room at home . . . the large clear glowing fire, the sounds of the family voices. Every effort to obliterate the picture brought back again the moment that had come at the dinner-table as they all sat silent for an instant with downcast eyes and she had suddenly longed to go on for ever just sitting there with them all.

Now, in the boat she wanted to be free for the strange grey river and the grey shores. But the home scenes recurred relentlessly. Again and again she went through the last moments . . . the goodbyes, the unexpected convulsive force of her mother’s arms, her own dreadful inability to give any answering embrace.

Dorothy Richardson – Pointed Roofs (Pilgrimage Vol. 1)

Richardson was dissatisfied with the form of both the romantic and the realist novel. She wanted to write a novel based on her own life experiences, but to transmute it into something different by seeing it through the eyes of her protagonist, Miriam. Miriam’s voice was to replace Richardson’s. But clearly, there was still a narrator behind that voice. Richardson’s great achievement was to develop a new way of expressing her responses to the world that she saw about her. She was a modernist and a feminist. Pilgrimage has been described as the first full-scale impressionist novel.

Extract from From Flâneur to Flâneuse: The City, Mobility and Gender in the Fiction of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf ©Bobby Seal

Picture of Deutsches Eck, Koblenz ©Bobby Seal