Dorothy Richardson belongs among those singular novelists who do not fall easily into readymade categories and who, because they are so resistant to labels, enjoy a relatively short-lived vogue as "originals"--often during their own lifetimes--and then become the property of literary historians, slipping out of range of the nonplussed critics.

The literary historians have credited Dorothy Richardson with being the first practitioner in English, if not the originator, of the stream-of-consciousness novel, a label for the novel which she herself rejected as imprecise and which, when applied to her own major work, the novels finally published together as Pilgrimage, had the effect of reducing it to a pale version of the more flam-boyantly brilliant experimental fiction of her Irish contemporary James Joyce. The other writers with whom she was linked--Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust--shared, with Richardson and Joyce, certain literary aims. They, too, not only looked for...