Experience not consciousness, backwaters not streams: Dorothy Richardson's “investigation of reality”

When May Sinclair used the phrase “stream of consciousness” to describe Dorothy Richardson's long narrative, Pilgrimage, she could not have predicted that phrase would become a sweeping description for a whole category of early twentieth‐century texts. However, while Richardson never denied consciousness was her subject, she conceived a lifelong dislike, sometimes expressed as an explicit hatred, of the metaphor of the stream. Rather than developing a theory of mind, Richardson wanted to refashion the novel form to represent women's experience. Though Pilgrimage does dwell on nominally subjective states – waiting, being bored, loneliness, sadness, frustrated desire, a sense of being stuck – experience for its heroine, Miriam Henderson, is always relational, that is always about the experience of being‐with not just being. Pilgrimage's frequent representations of an absence of connection should not be read as implying that social being is not possible, rather that society as it is currently constituted does not yet allow Richardson's protagonist, Miriam Henderson, to be‐with in the way that she desires.