The Autumn Schedule of the London Modernism Seminar is here! 18 Oct: Asha Rogers 'Un/modern matter' James Jordan 'The East End, Television and the Documentary Imagination, July 1939' 1 Nov: Aaron Rosenberg 'Climate of Conspiracy: Conrad, Greenland, and the Fourth Dimension' Jed Esty Title tbc.

I wish I were old and the whole damned thing were finished; then I shouldn't get this depressed feeling for nothing at all.

To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh stretch of days. Its little weight, treasure, minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past and present and future compactly welded.

The sick man, recovering, returns from his enforced detachment to a world transformed.

the mere sight of my m.s. brings on a horrid anxiety-nausea.

I have just been reading Millikan’s Science & Life & am still getting over shock of it, after several days. He’s the man who isolated the electron & banished immobility for good & all.

I'm re-reading Little Women & Good Wives. Marvellous stuff.

A long stop at the Bull Inn where ten charabancs were pulled up & all their feminine contents competing for one small upstairs lav. helped out by six half-full china slop-pails behind a screen in a bedroom with ever open door!

Yes dada, I rejoice in it. With a big reservation

At the moment I’m re-reading Isaiah at tea-time. Have you read him lately? He is so current. But why oh why are all prophets so angry?

I welcome Richardson scholars to join us as special guests. We had terrific support in 2022 and it greatly enriched the experience. DM me if you'd like to take part.

I will be hosting a group read of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage in 2026. American readers will be able to purchase a new US edition from @asterismbooks.bsky.social in September. Join the email list at ReadingPilgrimage.com to learn more.

A new Pilgrimage group read is starting in January 2026. @neglectedbooks.com readingpilgrimage.com?utm_source=m...

But, darling, our address is 32,      32,      thirty-two! Haven’t a ghost of an idea who lives next door.

there is a world of difference between feminine egoism & masculine selfishness

It's a shame that only Pointed Roofs has been translated into German so far. Pilgrimage is a literary stroke of luck for me. I think, I got there through Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

Can use a screwdriver, but shrink before machinery that flashes & bangs.

I stagger each morning to my feet. By the end of the morning I am beaten to my knees. By mid-afternoon, prone. Recover a little after tea & two pages Proust. Till supper I float detached – (except when there is an ear to be kept on a saucepan) – surrounded by pads, yellow envelopes.

Feel very subdued & lost. Can’t get over Conrad’s death. It seems to bring the whole edifice of modern English literature down with a crash, his removal. That's wicked I know. It's simply that the outlines of what is now building aren’t yet visible.

Of course you take your poetry seriously.

I'm through with psychanalysis ... all that now remains is a mass of facts at the service of us all. The theorem has gone phut. As all theorems must sooner or later.

if one is to bemoan the fate of the London flowers, one must bewail the hard lot of the field blossoms, the struggle, between neighbours, for existence. I protest that it is through civilisation that man has discovered Nature, it is only historic man who has the power of becoming as a little child.

The only connection I feel between V. Woolf & Jane Austen (& nearly all the lady writers, Eliot, Hobbes, Ward, Cholmondely, all I think except Charlotte [Brontë], is a certain snobbishness. Almost inevitable in Jane & detracting nothing from her supreme achievement.

The knocker has rusted off; so please rattle the flap of the letter-box; twice.

You are, I think, the strangest mixture. My record, so far, for mixtures.

The shock of July, of middle-age, is a threshold shock. A door is closing behind us and we turn sorrowfully to watch it close and do not discover, until we are wrenched away, the one opening ahead. 'Compensations?' Focus, July 1928

I fancy there are a good many factors left out by the P.As. [psychanalysts]

There are to-day so very few souls who love to read day-to-day records of life reduced to its simplest elements.

Road-coaching’s a queer business. Too engrossing, I think, driving about in the country instead of railing straight for a single destination, to be other than greatly fatiguing. Everything is seen at close quarters, so many incidents shared with so many people.

whereas & furthermore & boom . . . boom . . . . boom . . . .

Personally, I believe that “intellectual distinction” is bought, very generally, at a high cost. My idea of an “intellectual” is a person who as a rule is rather lacking in intelligence: i.e. in balance between the rational & emotional faculties.

The child has ceased to be a born criminal, a subject for continuous repression and admonition, and is ceasing to be a toy adult, a person whose mind is small blank sheet upon with the enterprising elder may inscribe what he will.

This is telegrammatically hasty, for I’m beseiged, hunted. Arrears of occupation. Battalions of demands.

We have a formidable array of week-ends. We want some Sundays-at-home.

the entertainment of the young people & their music is of course charming. In its particular way. Though probably I’d rather hear their talk.

The censorship seems hard at work trying to demonstrate its broad-mindedness.

It is quite a good thing you don’t provide pistols as well as torches upon your bedside tables.

I have just acquired a telephone. 24 June 1929

a visit, even to one’s best friends, can be a tax beyond one’s strength

Our large, brand new souls will be like Alice, hands & feet up chimneys & through windows.

Our doors are dreams. We open & shut them without need, just to see how be-utifully they do it. But the front lock, as I say, will no longer work.

the mere sight of my m.s. brings on a horrid anxiety-nausea.

the pattern magazine story. I meet a number of these in my brother-in-law’s Argosy & am horrified, fascinated, by their perfection. In style, arrangement, informativeness, psychological accuracy, they are vastly superior to the genuine work of the live goodish to good short-story writer. Yet dead.

Having learned, by experience, that time-estimates usually err on the side of modesty, we think five or five-fifteen will be a better meeting-time.

There they sit, the Fathers of Book Illustration, hunched lovingly over their tasks in their clean cell-studios.

Proust has been given to a friend of Moncrieff & also of Proust. I weep. For I know he will carry on even into those poignant, thrilling last volumes the hyper-elegant, eighteenth-century “sweet cheat” note. I foam. Albertine Disparue was for P. a simple, single note of agony. The Sweet Cheat Gone -

British Museum Reading Room I’ll be swotting here, my dear, most of my time, for the present. Afternoons anyway.

On this date in 2016, I looked at Pointed Roofs, the first of the 13 "chapter-volumes" of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. "In its very first paragraph, we see that contemplation is as essential to Miriam’s being as breathing: “She could sit by the fire & be quiet & think….” neglectedbooks.com/?...