Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) was a
British novelist best known for Pilgrimage, a sequence of semi-autobiographical
novels covering her character Miriam’s life from age 17 to her early 40s. The first book in the sequence, “Pointed
Roofs” (1915) was deemed to be the first novel to be written as a “stream of
consciousness”, though this was a term the author hated. The books are sometimes baffling when it is
difficult to understand what is going on, sometimes funny, but always engrossing,
with a delineation of the relation between women and men far sharper than that
of her better known contemporaries. The
beauty of her writing has prompted a series of drawings titled by quotations or
near-quotations.