“Stream of consciousness is a muddle-headed phrase. It is not a stream, it’s a pool, a sea, an ocean.””
Quotes by Dorothy M. Richardson
“Art demands what, to women, current civilisation won't give. There is for a Dostoyevsky writing against time on the corner of a crowded kitchen table a greater possibility of detachment than for a woman artist no matter how placed. Neither motherhood nor the more continuously exacting and indefinitely expansive responsibilities of even the simplest housekeeping can so effectively hamper her as the human demand, besieging her wherever she is, for an inclusive awareness, from which men, for good or ill, are exempt.””
“She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could look at the end, and read here and there a little and know; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that. . even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence - and the "stronger" the author was the more came.””
“It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, 'stories' - they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word.””
Dorothy M. Richardson was a pioneering English novelist and a significant figure in the development of modernist literature. Born in 1873, she is best known for her series of novels collectively title...