601. Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage
Dorothy Richardson
1915-1967

Around 2275 pages

Is there something about the last name Richardson that renders you incapable of brevity? I was prepared for the previous chunksters on the List. I knew Richardson's Clarissa was roughly a million words, and that Proust would take up a significant portion of my life, but I had never heard of Pilgrimage. I was unprepared for the 13 volumes I would have to endure before I earned my coveted checkmark. 

Oof, how am I going to summarize 13 volumes? Each novel is actually pretty distinct, so I wish the List had spared us the whole enchilada, and maybe treated us to two or three of these volumes. Our main character is Miriam Henderson, who is a stand in for our author. We start in 1893, with Miriam when she is 17 teaching English at a finishing school in Germany, and end in 1917. The juiciest bits were probably her affair with H.G. Wells (who was represented in the novel as Hypo Wilson). But even that wasn't that exciting; who didn't have sex with Wells back then? Of course, I love any lesbian plot line as well.

But even if I loved Miriam, it would be hard to sustain interest for her through such a massive work. As it were, I didn't like her very much. I found her to be a reactionary character, although I understand this is meant to be more about an inner journey than an outer one with an action packed plot. We get to experience her learning about feminism, and I'll be honest, I got really impatient with some of the discourses. None of them really made me think about any issue in a different way, I just wanted her to get to the finish line faster, where modern feminists are waiting.

I think the volumes really worth reading are The Tunnel, Dawn's Left Hand, and Clear Horizon. Otherwise, use the time it takes to finish Pilgrimage to do something else, like learn a foreign language, or get a medical degree.

RATING: ***--

Interesting Facts:

Virginia Woolf said that Richardson "has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender."

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