Richardson's Letters

Book Reviews Richardson's Letters Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Gloria G. Fromm, ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. xxxiii + 712 pp. $60.00 THE READING of a posthumously published book is always a somewhat melancholy experience, even when the project is as longawaited as this collection of Dorothy Richardson's letters. The late Gloria Fromm, Dorothy Richardson's biographer, has left the readers of this pioneering modernist writer a legacy lovingly prepared. Fromm refers to Richardson as a "maverick," and there was also something of the maverick in Fromm herself, who first published Richardson's biography in 1977, when the project of discovering "lost" women writers was in its first phase. Prior to the publication of Windows on Modernism, Richardson's letters were only available through special collections— the majority in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University—and several estates. Both Fromm and the University of Georgia Press deserve praise for this ambitious project, comprising about twenty-five percent of Richardson 's surviving letters. According to Fromm, the letters are chosen to define Richardson's "literary character" as well as the "full range of her mind and talents." Having studied the letters in the Beinecke collection, I can attest to the representativeness of this portion of Fromm's selection . Readers may be impatient with the slightness of content in some letters, particularly those written during wartime and in the 1950s, encomiums on saucepans and on the digestive benefits of bran and water. Yet Richardson herself would approve the inclusion of material which foregrounds minor, everyday events. Windows on Modernism includes a general introduction, a chronology of Richardson's life, and a detailed index. Organized roughly by decades, each section is introduced with an overview by the editor. The letters are unabridged and sparely but meticulously annotated; especially instructive are Fromm's notes identifying minor texts and writers such as Anita Loos or Sheila Kaye-Smith or obscure historical events like a 73 ELT 39:1 1996 miners' strike in 1926. As Fromm summarizes from unpublished letters in her notes, she efficiently supplies further information without adding to the length of the collection. She has a good sense of her audience, likely to be graduate students and faculty rather than undergraduates and general readers; however, we probably don't need to know that b.o. is body odor or that maquillage is makeup. The collection includes not only letters by Richardson but also some written to and about her. The latter are edifying as they give voice to major figures in Richardson's life—her husband Alan OdIe and fellow writer John Cowper Powys, for example. Richardson's unusual relationship with the artist Alan OdIe (she was fifteen years his senior and his main financial support for the thirty-one years of their marriage), is illuminated by the inclusion of four letters written by OdIe as well as through Richardson's affectionate portrait of him in her letters. During their courtship, briefly documented in letters from 1916-1917, OdIe writes Richardson of his consumption of "green absinthe in its cerulean fastness" and the "vascular demons dancing rag-time" in his head. Whimsically, OdIe describes himself on his bed during a World War I raid nonchalantly reading Pride and Prejudice. Readers hoping to learn of a passionate romance will have to be content with his "Breakfast without you degenerates into a mere meal. I don't like it." Richardson's most intimate response shows her "giggling" over his drawings and urging him to treat his tuberculous by entering a sanatorium: "And you would be a millionaire when you came out—a fat pink millionaire—does that not tempt you?" In the late 1940s, faced with the prospect that he might survive her and be unable to care for himself, the seventy-four year old Richardson claims (unconvincingly) to regret marrying OdIe. Letters from this era chronicle her teaching him, fifty-five years old, to write checks and leaving him instructions for filling out tax returns (he could not do compound addition). According to Richardson, OdIe worked prodigiously on his drawings until 8:30 each night, without any financial encouragement. In their willingness to...