Publishing Pilgrimage

The four volumes of the Libroj edition of Pilgrimage. About a year ago, I became a publisher. It was an act of desperation. Back in March 2016, as part of my second year of reading exclusively the work of neglected women writers, I took up the first volume of the 1938 Alfred A. Knopf edition of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, embarking on what I expected would be a challenging read — not expecting that it would prove a transformative one. As I wrote then, it was: Appropriate to devote a month to Richardson during this (second) year of exclusively reading the works of women. For Richardson was never anything but ferociously her own person, and that person was most definitely female. As Derek Stanford wrote in an obituary piece in 1957, “In all the two thousand pages of Pilgrimage there is not one effort to see the world from a man’s point of view.” I was surprised to find that Pilgrimage even qualified as a neglected book (or 13 of them). I’d studied 20th century English literature…