Pilgrimage (novel sequence)

Pilgrimage is a novel sequence by the British author Dorothy Richardson, from the first half of the 20th century. It comprises 13 volumes, including a final posthumous volume. It is now considered a significant work of literary modernism. Richardson's own term for the volumes was "chapters".

Miriam Henderson, the central character in the Pilgrimage novel sequence, is based on author's own life between 1891 and 1915.Pilgrimage was read as a work of fiction and "its critics did not suspect that its content was a reshaping of DMR's own experience", nor that that it was a roman à clef.

Miriam, like Richardson, "is the third of four daughters [whose] parents had longed for a boy and had treated her as if she fulfilled that expectation". This upbringing is reflected in Miriam's "strong ambivalence toward her role as a woman". Dorothy Richardson had the same ambivalence.

The first novel Pointed Roofs (1915), is set in 1893. At 17 years old Miriam Henderson, as Richardson herself did, teaches English at a finishing school in Hanover, Germany. Both author and character have to do this because of their father's financial problems. The following year, 1916, Richardson published Backwater, where Miriam "works as resident governess in a school frequented by the daughters of the North London middle class".

Honeycomb was published in 1917. Saturday Review commented, "Miss Richardson is not without talent but it is the talent of neurasthenia." And that the "only living thing in the book" is "the morbid and self-conscious mind [of the heroine]." In this novel Miriam works as a governess to the two children of the Corrie family during 1895. Mr. Corrie is a successful lawyer. Honeycomb ends with the suicide of Miriam's mother. Events in this novel again parallel Dorothy Richardson's own life: her mother committed suicide in 1895.

The fourth part, The Tunnel, appeared in 1919. In it Miriam starts on a more independent life when she takes a room in Bloomsbury in central London at 21, and works as a receptionist at a dental surgery. These are events again parellel Dorothy Richardson's life. Olive Heseltine described the novel to be "simply life. Shapeless, trivial, pointless, boring, beautiful, curious, profound. And above all, absorbing." On the other hand an "elderly male reviewer," for The Spectator found it disturbing that "Miss Richardson is not concerned with the satisfaction of the average reader".

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