Pointed Roofs

This opening volume of the thirteen-book Pilgrimage sequence introduces seventeen-year-old Miriam Henderson as she leaves her English home to teach at a girls’ school in Hanover, Germany. Homesick and proud, uncertain of herself yet fiercely observant, she measures the unfamiliar world around her against everything she has known. Richardson tells the story almost entirely from inside Miriam’s head, following her sensations and half-formed thoughts rather than any external drama, and in doing so wrote what many consider the first stream-of-consciousness novel in English. It was Virginia Woolf who praised Richardson for shaping a sentence to fit a woman’s mind. Newcomers to modernism will find here its earliest stirrings. Available as a free PDF and EPUB edition.