It was common for little magazines of the early twentieth century to suffer production delays. The Little Review, in which the fifth chapter-volume of Pilgrimage, Interim, was published, was usually characteristically unapologetic, blaming the post or even the subscribers themselves. Unfortunately, this journal has also experienced a hiatus since its last issue. We blame the long shadow of Covid, life in general, but mostly the editor, who has been busy with his co-editor, Jo Winning preparing the first volume Richardson’s Collected Letters (1900–1931), volume 1 in the Oxford Edition of the Complete Works. That volume is now in production and will be forthcoming in 2027. We expect two more volumes of Pilgrimage, Honeycomb & The Tunnel, and Interim & Deadlock to follow shortly thereafter.
‘Complete Works’ is always, of course, a revisable category. The editors discovered a handful of new letters while they were editing, and new items by Richardson continue to appear. Last year, Adam Guy spotted an unknown article by Richardson in a single digitised copy of The Healthy Life from 1913. The magazine was one of several edited by Richardson’s friend Florence Worland (to whom Revolving Lights was dedicated) and published by her husband Charles Daniel. Copies are now difficult to come by as the holdings at the British Library suffered bomb damage during the Second World War. The magazine is only available on microfilm and cannot be ordered online. Even with the help of the British Library’s brilliant archivists, it took time to identify the correct call numbers and retrieve the rolls of film. Unfortunately, the earliest issues from 1911 and 1912 are not available and were probably destroyed. Burn marks are visible on the images of the issues that made it through the Blitz. Nonetheless, we have now identified several new articles and reviews published in The Healthy Life between 1912 and 1914. Details have been added to Dorothy Richardson bibliography on the Richardson Society website. Adam Guy will be writing about their contents in a future issue of this journal. Needless to say, the editor of The Healthy Life also apologised for delays in production, apparently an unreliable printer. As an electronic journal, sadly, we can no longer make that excuse.
In this issue of Pilgrimages, Charlie Pullen explores Dorothy Richardson’s lifelong engagement with education and her resistance to rigid or authoritarian pedagogies. Through close readings of Pilgrimage, focusing on Miriam’s experience as a teacher in Pointed Roofs and Backwater, Pullen delineates Richardson’s own educational philosophy. Tracing the influence of Richardson’s own schooling at Southwest London College on her fiction, Pullen examines her critical responses to girls’ education in England and Germany in the 1890s. He concludes that Richardson’s fiction and philosophy promote an experimental, anti‑dogmatic pedagogy aligned with, but distinct from, anarchist and progressive educational thought in the early twentieth century.
Lily Nilipour draws on John Guillory’s distinction between monuments and documents to argue that Pilgrimage represents a modernist monument rather than a document that can be instrumentalised to illuminate better-known writers such as Virginia Woolf. Richardson’s marginalisation in literary histories obscures the distinctive feminist modernism of her granular, sentence‑level innovations, especially her experimental use of ellipses and punctuation. Her long modernist novel models a form of feminist self‑creation that resists conventional marriage plots and transforms reading into a collaboration with the reader.
Scott McCracken explores the role of interruption in Richardson’s aesthetic, connecting Pilgrimage with the music of George Antheil and the ubiquity of jazz in the 1920s. McCracken traces how unexpected auditory incursions—from a jangling phrase heard on Tottenham Court Road, to the sonic shock of Antheil’s 1922 Wigmore Hall concert—challenged Richardson to find a new language that might represent modernity’s soundscapes. He argues that noisy interruptions in Pilgrimage function not as background but as a structural principle, so that Richardson’s writing resonate with the dissonance and fragmentation found in Antheil’s avant-garde compositions and jazz.
In the final piece of this issue, we remember our friend and colleague, the eminent Richardsonian Howard Finn, who died last year. Howard was a unique individual and an exceptional and original scholar. Looking back, it is remarkable how frequently he contributed to this journal, with pieces that include reviews, an interview, and full-length articles. As a member of the editorial board, he also played an invaluable role as a peer reviewer. A connoisseur of the forgotten and the overlooked, Howard appreciated the role that little magazines, however unreliable, play in the creation of knowledge. A bibliography of his contributions to Richardson scholarship is included at the end of the article.