Complete eTexts of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Now Available

As faithful readers of this site (both of them) know, I devoted nearly two months’ reading and writing back in 2016 to Dorothy Richardson’s 13-volume masterpiece, Pilgrimage, and it remains perhaps the most profoundly revealing experience in by reading life. I personally think that all self-respecting adult males should be required to read Pilgrimage, as it will immerse them as no other text into the world as seen through a woman’s eyes. As Richardson wrote in the Foreword to the 1938 J. M. Dent edition of the first 12 volumes,

… the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism….

In 1913, the opening pages of the attempted chronicle became the first chapter of ‘Pilgrimage,’ written to the accompaniment of a sense of being upon a fresh pathway, an adventure so searching and, sometimes, so joyous as to produce a longing for participation; not quite the some as a longing for publication, whose possibility, indeed, as the book grew, receded to vanishing point.

At the start of this year, I noted that the J. M. Dent 1938 edition of Pilgrimage was available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4). If you wanted to read the posthumously assembled thirteen novel, March Moonlight, however, you had to locate the 1967 Dent 4-volume set or the Virago Modern Classics paperback set.

Jens Sadowski wrote me recently, however, that thanks to the hard work of the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders Canada, all thirteen volumes are now available not just in electronic format, but with fully-corrected texts. The first six books are available on Project Gutenberg:

1. Pointed Roofs
2. Backwater
3. Honeycomb
4. The Tunnel
5. Interim
6. Deadlock

The remaining seven books are available on the Faded Page, a Canadian public domain text site:

7. Revolving Lights
8. The Trap
9. Oberland
10. Dawn’s Left Hand
11. Clear Horizon
12. Dimple Hill
13. March Moonlight

To paraphrase Charles Ives, When you read strong feminine fiction like this, sit up and USE YOUR EYES LIKE A MAN!