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Dorothy Richardson
British writer (1873–1957) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 – 17 June 1957) was a British novelist and journalist.
Dorothy Richardson | |
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![]() Bedford Square, Bloomsbury. Richardson began her writing career when she lived in Bloomsbury, London. | |
Born | (1873-05-17)17 May 1873 Abingdon, England |
Died | 17 June 1957(1957-06-17) (aged 84) Beckenham, Kent, England |
Resting place | Beckenham |
Occupation | Novelist and journalist |
Genre | Novel |
Literary movement | Modernism |
Notable works | Pilgrimage |
Spouse | Alan Odle |
Richardson was born in 1873. At first she went to a private school for girls. But in 1890 she had to leave school because her father had money trouble. After that she worked at some teaching jobs in Germany and London. She took care of her mother who suffered from depression and killed herself in 1895.[1][2]
Richardson became a secretary in a dentist's office and lived in Bloomsbury. She met the writer H. G. Wells and they began an affair. This led to pregnancy and a miscarriage. In 1908 she left London and moved to a farm that was owned by a Quaker friend. In 1914 she wrote two books about Quakers.[1]
From 1908 to 1912, she wrote for The Saturday Review. In 1912 she started writing Pointed Roofs. This novel was the first of thirteen books that became the group called Pilgrimage. In 1917 Richardson married a young artist, Alan Odle.[1]
In her novels Richardson found a way of writing that readers thought was something new. In a review of Pointed Roofs, May Sinclair called Richardson's writing "stream of consciousness."[2] This was the first time that well-known phrase was used about literature.[3]
In 1923 Virginia Woolf described one sentence from Revolving Lights in this way: "It is a woman's sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman's mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex."[1]
Richardson died in a nursing home in Kent, England in 1957.[2]