The Ultimate Astonisher: Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage"

[para. 1]: "It is by now a commonplace that feminist scholars, responding to the call to expose these "half-truths," have been re-opening the doors of modernist literary history in order to admit women writers into a canon that has for too long excluded them. Virginia L. Smyers stresses that women, including Dorothy Richardson, Bryher, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Mary Butts, Frances Gregg, Marianne Moore, May Sin- clair, Amy Lowell, Harriett Weaver, Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy, "were not a sidelight of the literary production of the period; they were as much a part of it as Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. That the men's names have emerged since as the stars might have much to do with the per- ceptions of the predominantly male critics." The accuracy of this state- ment can be measured by focussing on the fate of one of these women: Dorothy Richardson."