Matt Thorne on Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson (1938)

I remember seeing Edmund White on TV talking about the Booker Prize sometime in the ‘80s or early ‘90s and suggesting—seemingly seriously but also with a sense of mischief—that to win the Booker Prize novels had to be short, as judges didn’t like to have to read long books multiple times. And though there are exceptions to this, for the most part the distinction holds. Of course long books are often published in multiple volumes, at different times, which may prevent the whole from being appreciated. But I would like to nominate a long novel, to be taken into consideration all at once, all thousand pages plus of it. It’s not as good as the greatest long novel, A la recherché du temps perdu, but I find it better than Woolf, and think it’s a shame that Woolf’s experimentation with stream-of-consciousness is valued (at least in the world at large) above Richardson’s use of the device. I first read the novel in my teens and wrote a dissertation on it at university, but back then was nowhere near up to the task and now wish I’d never tried, as it’s a book that shrugs off interpretation. It seems like a simple bildungsroman, with Miriam Henderson existing as a very thinly disguised Richardson, and in places is almost childlike in its seemingly naïve autobiography, but over the whole becomes so much more. For me the greatest novels truly depict an entire life lived, and there is something so inspiring in Richardson’s dogged ability to get everything into a book and to force the reader to see life so thoroughly through her protagonist’s eyes. It is, unarguably, rough around the edges, but that only adds to the author’s achievement. This is life as much as art, journal as much as literary accomplishment. It is one of those novels that asks as much of the reader as the writer, less an act of reading but an act of bearing witness and in doing so, helping to contribute to Miriam’s emancipation.