Windows on modernism

Windows on Modernism collects approximately one quarter of the eighteen hundred or so known surviving letters of Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), author of the thirteen-volume serial novel Pilgrimage. An uncompromising and utterly original novelist, Richardson was perhaps the first English writer to employ the style that came to be known as stream of consciousness. She stands alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Proust as one of the great experimentalists in modern prose fiction.

By her own estimation the number of words Richardson devoted annually to correspondence was almost equivalent to three of her books. Given the strength of her epistolary urge and the autobiographical nature of Pilgrimage, the letters in Windows on Modernism will stimulate fresh inquiries into Richardson's life and art and their interactions.

In light of Richardson's attempt to represent a generation and class of late Victorian and Edwardian women in her fiction, the letters can also be read as cultural documents, conveying the texture of their author's daily life in a world shaped by social and sexual awakenings amid the competing forces of humanism, communism, and fascism.