Can feminist Dorothy at long last lose her Virginia?
The Lodger By Louisa Treger St Martin’s Press, £16.99
HOW COULD two literary grandes dames of the early 20th century suffer such opposing fortunes? Both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson can reasonably lay claim to have been the mother of the modernist stream-of-consciousness writing style. Yet, arguably more by quirk of fate than enduring merit, Woolf remains read and greatly revered, while Richardson’s name has been all but lost.
At least until now, when a new blue plaque commemorates her Woburn Walk house, and Louisa Treger depicts the troubled reality of Richardson’s twenties in her debut novel, The Lodger.
At the heart of this piquant tale is Dorothy’s ill-starred love affair with H. G. “Bertie” Wells, who was married at the time to Dorothy’s dear school friend, Jane. For all his scifi sparkle, the War of The Worlds author had no scruples about fomenting war among his women — seemingly egocentric and amoral, he persuades Dorothy, over weekend visits to his marital country home, that Jane cannot fulfil his physical demands and that she, Dorothy, is the sensual muse of his life.
While Jane panders to Bertie’s home comforts and tends to her azaleas, Dorothy becomes sexually spellbound. But her wild, transgressive passion for the short, sandy-haired man of thin arms and slightly tumescent stomach is curiously at odds with her workaday existence as a Harley Street dentist’s assistant, living hand to mouth in a dingy boarding house.
Two fellow boarders — decent, available men — offer Dorothy the safe haven Edwardian women were supposed to seek. But Bertie’s only true rival is Veronica who rents the upstairs room, a well-born suffragette for whom intimacy is as vital as the vote.
Dorothy recognises early in her amorous adventures that “one’s inmost self was lost and not found through close relationships”. Breaking the rules brings her shame and heartbreak, but also, in time, creative inspiration — a weighty, 13-part, semi-autobiographical narrative entitled Pilgrimage. The first volume, Pointed Roofs, came out in 1915, the same year — but just before — Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.
For Treger’s tale to re-introduce Dorothy Richardson is gratification enough. But her book’s page-turning delight lies in capturing the inner world of her writerly heroine without ever intruding as a storyteller — by mirroring, in elegant essence, exactly what Richardson (and Woolf) strove to do in original ways.
Treger certainly whets the appetite to know more of the real-life “Lodger” — and to add Pilgrimage to the reader’s wish-list. It’s intriguing to discover how much Richardson and Woolf had in common: besides breaching social convention, both took Sapphic as well as straight lovers, revolutionised the novel and were traumatised by the early death of a parent. Richardson’s mother killed herself after her husband’s financial failure, while Woolf’s mother died when she was 13, triggering Virginia’s first breakdown.
But, while the young Woolf’s particular brand of Bloomsbury glamour burned brightly, Richardson’s bohemian twenties proved a time of heartbreak, poverty and desolation. Treger portrays the lodger’s feminism — that need to make a life of her own, beyond the reach of masculine demands — as particular to its post-Victorian time and social place.
Her greater gift is to capture the tension between a craving to belong and a fierce desire to be free that women invariably experience, and must resolve in their own, outside-the-rule-book way.
It’s intriguing to discover how much Richardson and Woolf had in common