Amy Shearn makes the case for the struggle of author Dorothy Miller Richardson.
As much as I do love my dear prolific weirdo Knausgaard, he hasn’t really done anything all that revolutionary. In fact, exactly a century ago, England saw the beginnings of a similarly expansive novel brimming with what Ben Lerner called Knausgaard’s “radical inclusiveness … style-less style … apparently equal fascination with everything.” And no, I don’t mean Proust or Joyce, although at the time the writer was often mentioned in the same breath. I mean a multivolume novel that created its own wildly inventive, truly brand-new form, sending shockwaves through the literary establishment of the time: Pilgrimage, by Dorothy Miller Richardson.
