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May 16, 2022

Almanac of Story Tellers: Dorothy Richardson

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books

Today is the story of May 17th
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    It is the 137th day of the year, leaving 228 days remaining in 2022.
   
    On this date in 1873, the English author Dorothy Richardson was born.


    Richardson was one of the first writers to routinely use the stream-of-consciousness technique in writing her novels -- although she always insisted her many published works were one novel, and the separate publishings were merely chapters. She used the technique to give her female character a distinctive voice.

    Her novel was Pilgrimage -- a lengthy work, published in 11 separate occasion comprising 13 chapters between 1915 and 1938. It is often seen as a semi-autobiographical interpretation of Richardson's life.

    Her style and voice and been compared to that of contemporaries James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. 

    The protagonist and narrator of Pilgrimage is Miriam Henderson, the third of four sisters from a family who wanted boys. Henderson, often called and treated as a boy, is "ambivalent toward her role as a women," according to Sidney Janet Kaplan, a professor of English, writing about Richardson in 1975.

    (Richardson was the last of four girls, and her parents often treated as as the son they wanted. She shared Henderson's ambivalence toward her gender, Kaplan wrote.)

    Throughout the novel, Richardson's and Henderson's lives mirror each other. Richardson used stream of consciousness, along with free and indirect speech -- a mingling of first- and third-person voices -- in her narrative to represent how woman think. Much of the novel's chapters are about Henderson's thoughts on philosophy, questions on the nature of reality, and the intense wonder of travel.

    She died in 1957 in England.   

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