15 Facts About Dorothy Richardson

Dorothy Miller Richardson was a British author and journalist.

Dorothy Richardson emphasises in Pilgrimage the importance and distinct nature of female experiences.

Dorothy Richardson was born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in 1873, the third of four daughters.

Dorothy Richardson " attributed this habit to her own boylike willfulness".

Dorothy Richardson's family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883.

In 1895 Dorothy Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year.

Dorothy Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.

Dorothy Richardson spent much of 1912 in Cornwall, and then in 1913 rented a room in St John's Wood, London, though she lived in Cornwall.

Dorothy Richardson began writing Pointed Roofs, in the autumn of 1912, while staying with JD Beresford and his wife in Cornwall, and it was published in 1915.

Dorothy Richardson was fifteen years younger than her, tubercular and an alcoholic, and was not expected to live long.

Dorothy Richardson supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years, as Alan made little money from his art.

The last chapters of Pilgrimage, published during Dorothy Richardson's lifetime, were Clear Horizon in 1935 and Dimple Hill with the 1938 Collected Edition.

Dorothy Richardson saw Pilgrimage as one novel for which each of the individual volumes were "chapters".

Dorothy Richardson is an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature.

John Cowper Powys in his 1931 study of Dorothy Richardson, describes her as London's William Wordsworth, who instead of "the mystery of mountains and lakes" gives us "the mystery of roof-tops and pavements".