Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs

Pilgrimage

Pointed Roofs

By Dorothy Richardson

In a review of Pointed Roofs (The Egoist April 1918), May Sinclair first applied the term "stream of consciousness" in her discussion of Richardson's stylistic innovations. Richardson, however, preferred the term interior monologue. Pointed Roofs was the first volume in a sequence of 13 novels titled Pilgrimage. Miriam Henderson, the central character in Pilgrimage, is based on author's own life between 1891 and 1915.

Richardson is also an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. Her wariness of the conventions of language, her bending of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are used to create a feminine prose, which Richardson saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. Virginia Woolf in 1923 noted, that Richardson "has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender."

Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 - 17 June 1957) was a British author and journalist. Author of Pilgrimage, a sequence of 13 novels, she was one of the earliest modernist novelists to use stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. Richardson also emphasizes in Pilgrimage the importance and distinct nature of female experiences.