DOROTHY RICHARDSON

This is a sympathetic critique of the first, but now almost unread, stream-of-consciousness novel Pilgrimage. The first volume of Dorothy Richardson's twelve volume work, was published in 1915, the last in 1938, and during that period her explorations in this genre were brilliantly surpassed by Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf. For this series is a microscopic account of the subjective life of a young woman whose experiences on the Continent and in London expose her to various artists, social reformers and rather pallid love affairs until a final one results in an illegitimate child, a mystical experience, and the final embracing of the Quaker faith. (This so-called heroine and the author can be almost exactly equated.) Blake's opinion is that this is a very fine work of the first order which has been long neglected, and if his style were more brilliant and his arguments more ardent and convinced this would fulfill its purpose in resuscitating what is acknowledged to have had an ""extraordinary significance in the development of the modern English novel..."" But its lacks will confine it to serious students of modern literature, literary historians and university shelves.