Dorothy Richardson Annotated

BOOK REVIEWS derlying family dynamics, and takes up where other readers leave off in exploring the dark underpinnings of Stevie's death. The reading of Under Western Eyes, which she calls Conrad's most autobiographical text, illuminatingly links personal alienation and dislocation with political ideology, although some of this linkage's aesthetic dimensions, in particular the necessarily complex narratorial strategies that engender it, are not as highlighted as they might be. One of this study's virtues is the clarity of its writing (laying aside its sometimes strident tone), and one of the blurbs on the dust-jacket rightly praises the elegance of Ash's prose. Her editors, however, have not in the main served her well: a shorter, more reader friendly, more tightly focused book would have given greater pleasure, and arguably disciplined the handling of ideas. If the novelist's art consists partly in knowing what to omit, the savvy critic too ought to attempt engaging and holding an audience by, as the French say, not whipping every cat. J. H. Stape Cha-Am, Thailand Dorothy Richardson Annotated George H. Thomson. Notes on "Pilgrimage": Dorothy Richardson Annotated . Greensboro: ELT Press, 1999. 352 pp. $40.00 NOTES ON "PILGRIMAGE": Dorothy Richardson Annotated is an indispensable guide for the scholar enmeshed in the study of Richardson 's thirteen-volume novel. For the first time, Professor Thomson leads Richardson's readers through Pilgrimage's labyrinthine universe of historical and literary references that range from the last decade of the Victorian era to the first decade of the twentieth century. In this sense, this book complements Thomson's 1996 A Reader's Guide to Dorothy Richardson 's "Pilgrimage", in which he provided a minute account of the novel 's chronology of events and a directory of characters. The two books profit from Thomson's thorough commitment to research on Dorothy Richardson, which started in 1989, when he retired from his position as a professor in English. Both general readers of Pilgrimage and those focused more deeply on its study will benefit from this highly specialized and meticulous work, which is also easy to read. In his introduction, Thomson explains that he meant the subtitle of his book, Dorothy Richardson Annotated, to underline his biographical interpretation of Pilgrimage. Thus, for him "the fictional life of Miriam Henderson and the actual life of Dorothy Richardson so frequently in477 ELT 43 : 4 2000 tersect that the annotations are as much about the author as about the fiction." Thomson situates his work along the lines of the late Gloria Fromm, whose biographical approach to Pilgrimage he adopted when he gained access to her notes and materials on Richardson. Notes on "Pilgrimage " follows Fromm's meticulous dissection of biography and fiction , so that the coincidences and discrepancies between Miriam's and Dorothy's lives are thoroughly explained. The author engages in dilemmas that could seem too complex to be debated in a three-page introduction , but which turn out to be thought provoking for the more dedicated reader: "Is Pilgrimage autobiographical fiction or fictionalized autobiography !" Thomson dexterously argues that despite the fact that Richardson "will neither be confined nor defined by these conventional literary categories," it is inevitable that "the act of annotating the many references whereby Pilgrimage is tied to the world of late Victorian and Edwardian England tends inevitably to foreground the autobiographical dimension of the work." The combined presentation of biographical data on Richardson and fictional events from Pilgrimage is an enlightening source of information for the reader, who is, nevertheless, left free to decide whether Pilgrimage should be considered fiction or autobiography. Whichever option the reader chooses, he or she is left with a better understanding of Richardson's monumental work. The annotations are organized over four chapters that correspond to the four volumes of Richardson's roman-fleuve and each quotation is preceded by its page number and line, which makes the task of locating the quotations straightforward and fast. Moreover, both the indexes of themes and annotated subjects that close the monograph provide an invaluable help in linking the multiple occurrences of quotations throughout the whole series of Pilgrimage. The kind of quotations that the reader will find in this book...