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  • Dorothy Miller Richardson: A Bibliography 1900 to 1999
  • Averill Buchanan (bio)

Dorothy Miller Richardson (1873–1957) is one of the most neglected English modernists, her reputation resting on her sequence of thirteen novels collectively entitled Pilgrimage. Yet she also published short stories and poetry, and contributed many essays, sketches and reviews to newspapers and periodicals of the period. With her writing, she supported both herself and her husband, the artist Alan Odle. Such productivity merits attention, and a bibliography offers an opportunity not only to document Richardson’s own work in all its diversity, but also to investigate the extent of others’ interest in her as an individual and as a purportedly minor writer.

Accuracy has been my guiding principle in compiling this bibliography. The initial scholarly bibliographical and biographical work has been done by Gloria G. Fromm (1931–1992) and published during the 1960s and 1970s. I have updated this material to 1999; in doing so, I have uncovered some omissions and mistakes. For example, because Fromm used ibid instead of repeating each periodical title, new insertions in the 1994 reprint of Fromm’s biography made by George H. Thomson merely interrupt Fromm’s sequence of ibids without reverting to the original periodical title. Therefore, to avoid any misunderstanding, I have repeated each title in full.

The bibliography is divided into three sections. Part One lists all the work by Richardson, organized first by genre, and then chronologically by date of publication. I have also included a section on reprints of her shorter work in anthologies and collections. Part Two charts contemporary reviews of her work and the obituary notices on her death in 1957. Part Three lists in chronological order books and articles about Richardson and her work, again separating reprints of these secondary sources from first publications. Entries in this section are annotated only when the title of an article or chapter does not make clear how it relates to Richardson. Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters are inserted chronologically by publication date rather than by the date of the diary entry or letter, since the public airing of Woolf’s views would have a greater impact on Richardson’s reputation than any merely private record. [End Page 135]

In compiling a bibliography on a non-canonical author such as Richardson, one must be as inclusive and thorough as possible in order to get a full picture not only of the volume and the range of the author’s own output, but also to accurately ascertain the amount of scholarly interest in her work. Thus, while annotations and lists of reprints add considerably to the length, they nevertheless provide invaluable information on trends in Richardson studies. The many passing references to Richardson in the numerous books on modernism or in general studies of the history of the novel often credit her (rightly) as a pioneer in experimental fictional techniques before glibly passing on to devote pages to an examination of Joyce, Woolf, Conrad and Lawrence. Yet, as Parts One and Two of this bibliography make clear, Richardson, like her contemporaries, wrote much more than fiction, earning herself a professional reputation as journalist, essayist, and translator. She came to publishing relatively late in life: she was forty-two years old when her first novel, Pointed Roofs was published in 1915, but her career spans forty-three years and two world wars. The years from 1915 to 1935 represent her greatest output. Then, in 1938 she published the apparent culmination of her life’s work in a twelve-volume collected edition of Pilgrimage. Afterward, however, she continued writing well into her seventies, with a final although unfinished volume, March Moonlight, only published in full after her death.

Some well-known names appear as reviewers of her work, most notably Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Conrad Aiken, J.B. Priestley, Rebecca West, and Winifred Bryher, although the practice of anonymity in reviewing obscures an assessment of the quality of her critical reputation. However, the level of interest in Richardson’s work can also be gauged by the presence—or absence—of secondary sources which it has generated. During her lifetime, the publication in 1931 of John Cowper Powys’ tribute to...

Additional Information

ISSN
1529-1464
Print ISSN
0022-281X
Pages
pp. 135-160
Launched on MUSE
2000-08-01
Open Access
No
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