The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson is written in a sometimes daunting, scholarly language and will find a select readership: academics and students of Women's Studies or English. A fundamental understanding of semiotics and intertextuality is mandatory for a full appreciation of the complexities of such a text. However, if that appeals to you, let me say that Winning has written a powerful study of the life of Dorothy Richardson and her largest work, The Pilgrimage, a thirteen volume bildungsroman or, if you will, biography of a fictional character, Miriam Henderson. According to Winning, The Pilgrimage is a hidden narrative of lesbian desire in the early 20th century. Winning connects the events in Richardson's own life to those of her protagonist's life and makes a good case for a subtextual autobiography, or in Winning's useage, "auto/biography."

I am ambivalent about scholars who seek out lesbian writers from the past and explore and expose their lives and work. Such texts, while deconstructed in the present, will forever be a part of the past in which they were created, and if the lesbians who came before me worked hard to hide their sexuality, who am I or anyone else to dig up those bones? Yet, lesbian writers have a history, albeit censored and concealed, and modern students need to understand what homosexual lives were like before Ellen, Melissa and K.D. lived theirs under the gaze of contemporary pop culture. In the context of her time Dorothy Richardson left the best legacy she could, and a fine body of work. The Pilgrimage is a feminist quest where Miriam Henderson (Richardson's heroine), "search[es] for the core of what it means to be a female subject in the world"(14).

Virginia Woolf wrote about Richardson's fluid and flexible transcriptions of female consciousness: "She has invented a sentence that we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." Winning's take on Dorothy Richardson will be controversial. Other scholars may dispute it or ignore it, but she makes her case thoroughly. Winning delves into the Freudian thought and theory from Richardson's era, including gender dysphoria and extensive analysis of a female homosexual patient case study. This section is thick with Oedipal symbols and can be somewhat overwhelming.

Winning deconstructs (or dykonstructs) both text and context. The Pilgrimage reflects the difficulties of writing about a lesbian affair in this historical place and time and explores how the trials of Radcliff Hall and Oscar Wilde definitively affected Richardson's text. Meanwhile, the social climate changed the cultural climate of post WWI Europe and suppressed fictional realism in literature as modernism demanded a new approach to writing, epitomized by the stream of consciousness writing of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Comparing Richardson to Woolf, Winning claims: "Both were motivated by twin aims: the desire to reconfigure the "map of fiction" and the wish to record lesbian desire in a way that would evade the homophobic censors of the British Establishment"(132). Many readers find Richardson's writing on the verge of a "private language" because of the subtextual strategies she deployed(134).

In addition to the coded lesbianism, Winning points out several instances of hidden narrative symbols echoing other lesbian works of the time, such as those of Hall and Woolf. The last section is devoted to silence, the censorious atmosphere of the written word and its affects on our literary legacy. Winning relentlessly emphasizes her points until the reader experiences this same epiphany, and understands just how hard lesbian writers have fought for a voice, and what their imposed silence has cost them.

In general, while this is not light reading, the reader-rewards are great. For me, by the time I finished the book my feelings had changed about scholars seeking out gay and lesbian writers from the past. Maybe we have a responsibility to do so, to read beyond the printed word, to examine the lives of the authors and the political times in which they lived, to evaluate the text, not mimetically, but with the epistemological approach of the German theorists, Burk and Kant. Put simply, in a period when authors were tried and imprisoned for their homosexuality, even women like Gertrude Stein took care with the written word. I don't think it would be uncommon for a lesbian to incorporate public homophobia into her personal belief system; this often happens today under better circumstances. We have a responsibility to put the text in the context in which it was written, and for gay and lesbian authors of the past that is doubly important.

Martha Miller