Backwater
The second volume of Dorothy Richardson’s landmark sequence Pilgrimage follows Miriam Henderson to a shabby-genteel girls’ school in North London, where she takes a post as resident teacher. The outward events are modest: lessons, meals, walks, a suitor she cannot quite want, evenings reading novels she knows she should disdain. What matters is the flow of Miriam’s mind, rendered so closely that the reader seems to live inside her impressions moment by moment. Richardson was among the first English writers to build a whole book from this inner stream, and Backwater deepens the experiment begun in Pointed Roofs. This free PDF and EPUB edition offers a key chapter in one of modernism’s boldest and most overlooked achievements.
About the Author
Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957) was an English novelist and journalist regarded as a pioneer of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Her thirteen-volume sequence Pilgrimage, written over decades, followed a single woman’s inner life and influenced modernists such as Virginia Woolf, though it long remained underread.
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