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Richardson was born in Abingdon, Berkshire into impoverished gentility. From the age of seventeen she was forced to earn her own living. This she did by working as a tutor-governess, first in Hanover, then in north London, and finally in an English country house. Her mother committed suicide in 1895, leading to the complete break-up of the family. Richardson moved back to London to work in Harley StreetHarley Street is a road in the City of Westminster in London. It is noted for its large number of private dentists, surgeons, and doctors. Its name was synonymous with private medical care in the United Kingdom. The general area around it contains several as secretary/assistant to a dentist.
In London, Richardson began moving among avant garde Socialist and artistic circles, including the Bloomsbury set . She started to publish translationTranslation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language — the source text — and the production of another, equivalent text in another language — the target text or translation''. Traditionally, translation has alws and freelance journalismJournalism is a discipline of collecting, verifying, reporting and analyzing information gathered regarding current events, including trends, issues and people. It is sometimes defined more broadly as the pursuit of the truth. Those who practice journalis and eventually gave up her secretarial job. In 1917, she married the artist Alan Odel . Odel was many years younger than Richardson and was a distinctly bohemian figure, with his waist-length hair wound around his head. Until Odel's death in 19481948 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). Events January January 1 Nationalisation of UK railways to form British Railways. Arab militants lay siege to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. First day of the Ital, the couple spent winters in CornwallCornwall ( Cornish: Kernow is the part of Great Britain's south-west peninsula that is west of the River Tamar. It is generally regarded as a county of, and a part of England, although advocates of Cornish independence regard it as a separate nation, and and summers in London.
Throughout her career, Richardson published large numbers of essayAn essay is a short work of authorship. It is a discussion of a topic from an author's personal point of view, as influenced by subjective experience and personal reflection. Topics may include actual happenings, issues of human life, morality, ethics, res, poems, short stories, sketches and other pieces of journalism. However, her reputation as a writer rests firmly on the Pilgrimage sequence. The first of the Pilgrimage novels, Pointed Roofs ( 1915) was the first stream of consciousness novel in English, although Richardson herself disliked the term, preferring to call her way of writing interior monologues. The discovery of this technique is usually credited to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The failure to recognise Richardson's role is partly due to the critical neglect of Richardson's writing during her lifetime. The fact that Pointed Roofs displayed the writer's admiration for German culture at a time when Britain and Germany were at war may also have contributed to the general lack of recognition of the book's radical importance.
Richardson can also be read as a feminist writer, not because she overtly calls for equal rights for women but because her work quite simply assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. The central character in Pilgrimage, Miriam, is a woman in search of her own full identity, which she knows quite clearly cannot be defined in male terms of reference. Richardson's wariness of the conventions of language, her bending to near breaking point of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are means towards what she termed feminine prose, which she clearly saw as necessary for the expression this female experience.
Dorothy M. Richardson died in Beckenham, Kent in her 85th year.