Dorothy Richardson was a major figure in twentieth-century literature. Her long, thirteen-volume work, Pilgrimage, is a landmark of European modernism. The Oxford Edition of Dorothy Richardson is the first authoritative version of her work. It includes a six-volume edition of Pilgrimage, a volume of her shorter fiction and poetry, a volume of her non-fiction, and three volumes of her collected letters. The edition includes a full scholarly apparatus in a form that is accessible to scholars, students, and the general reader.
Pilgrimage (1915-1967) was Richardson's magnum opus. A semi-autobiographical narrative cycle, the first 'chapter-volume', Pointed Roofs, was published in 1915 and the last unfinished part, March Moonlight, in a posthumous collected edition in 1967. It was the first literary work to be described as 'stream of consciousness'--by May Sinclair in 1918--a phrase which came to serve as a description for a whole movement in early twentieth-century fiction.
Known and admired by writers throughout the twentieth century, like many women modernists, Richardson had to wait until second wave feminism in the 1970s for proper critical recognition. Since then her reputation has gradually been re-established. The Oxford edition of her work is the culmination of several decades of scholarship and restores her to her rightful place in literary history.
Volume IV presents Pilgrimage 1 & 2: Pointed Roofs and Backwater.
Editorial PrinciplesChronologyPreface to PilgrimageHistory of the TextIntroductionPILGRIMAGE 1Pointed RoofsBackwaterExplanatory NotesAppendix A: Character ListsAppendix B: SynopsesAppendix C: John Beresford 'Introduction' to the 1915 EditionAppendix D: Dorothy Richardson, 'Foreword' to the 1938 EditionAppendix E: Textual ApparatusBibliography
Scott McCracken is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is General Editor of the Oxford Edition of Dorothy Richardson. His books include Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2007), Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester, 1998) and, as co-author, Benjamin's Arcades: an unguided tour (Manchester 2006). He is co-editor with David Glover of The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction (2012) and with Sally Ledger of Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 1995). He is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled, Thinking Through Defeat: Literary Responses to Political Failure from the Paris Commune to the Berlin Wall.
