She cried and cried until there were no tears left, and the feeling of desolation began to lose its searing edge. She realized she was grieving for something that had died a long time ago.
New thoughts arrived; cooler thoughts. The officer at the Café Royal thought she was still desirable. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to find love again? The fortune-teller she visited so long ago had accurately predicted she would become a writer. She might be right about Dorothy marrying late, too.
Perhaps she would find someone she could be with, someone who didn’t want to dominate and possess her. Someone who had his or her own fertile and independent inner life, which would allow a certain distance in their relationship and give her the space to be herself. Dorothy also wanted a love she could be open and proud about. Surely it was not too much to hope for?
She was moving toward something … a lessening of yearning. Dare she call it peace? There were glimmers of brightness ahead. She only had to reach them.
Afterword: A Note on Sources
I stumbled on Dorothy Richardson by accident in the library of London University. I was searching for an angle on Virginia Woolf for my Ph.D. thesis that hadn’t been written before—without much success. Opening a book at random, I found a review that Virginia had written about a writer whose name I did not recognize:
Dorothy Richardson has invented … a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes … (Review of Revolving Lights, Dorothy Richardson, from The Nation and the Athenaeum, May 19, 1923)
I was riveted. Who was Dorothy Richardson? How had she come to reinvent the English language in order to record the experience of being uniquely female? Interestingly, Virginia was elsewhere grudging in her praise of Dorothy’s work, as she was about other female contemporaries, notably Katherine Mansfield. I suspect she perceived them as rivals and threats.
Further investigation led me to Dorothy’s life work: the twelve-volume autobiographical novel-sequence, Pilgrimage. I began to read with mounting excitement, for it seemed that here was someone of undoubted importance, now largely consigned to oblivion. An enduring fascination with Dorothy was thus ignited, and a conviction that her remarkable story needed to be unearthed and retold. Many years and a Ph.D. thesis later, The Lodger was born.
My novel is a melding of fact and fiction, broadly following the known biographical outline of Dorothy’s life. Where it suited my purposes, I took certain liberties with the facts and the time scheme. For instance, in life, the first volume of Pilgrimage was published after the marriage of Veronica and Benjamin. In my novel, the book comes out before they get engaged. In reality, Dorothy’s friendship with Bertie Wells developed into a love affair over a ten-year period, but for the sake of narrative impetus, I fast-forwarded and had him seduce her during the course of one spring.
I also omitted some aspects of their lives, such as their mutual interest in Fabian Socialism, feeling it did not sufficiently enhance the interest of my account. I chose not to write about the Wells’s two young sons. By Bertie’s own admission, his children’s early care was largely entrusted to nurses and governesses (H. G. Wells in Love, p. 29); moreover, Dorothy didn’t appear to have had a relationship with either of the boys. There are other departures from fact; time and space do not permit me to list them individually.
My main source for writing The Lodger was Pilgrimage, and I am greatly indebted to it. Inevitably, there are similarities of character and incident between the two works. On occasion, I followed Dorothy’s narrative quite closely, particularly in the romance between Mrs. Baker and Mr. Cundy, in the early scenes with Veronica, and in the extraordinary way Dorothy engineered the relationship between Veronica and Benjamin. More often, though, my interpretation of events differs from hers. The shape and tone of the love affairs with Bertie and Veronica are my creation, as are Veronica’s prison experiences.
There are several episodes in Pilgrimage that are treated in a strangely oblique—almost perfunctory—manner, as though too painful, or shaming, to be voiced. Most striking among these is Dorothy’s mother’s suicide. Dorothy conveys this dramatic and tragic event by a blank space on the page. Evidently it was so unbearable, she literally lacked the words to describe it; she does not provide a single detail, and the reader scarcely knows what has happened without the supplementary biographical facts. Dorothy’s account of her miscarriage is nearly as evasive: she presents it as a phantom pregnancy. Similarly, the sexual nature of the relationship with Veronica Leslie Jones is never explicit—Dorothy simply refers to nights spent together. These omissions—or repressions—form a significant part of my account; indeed, imagining and coloring them in was the most engrossing part of writing about Dorothy’s life.
The following works were also immensely useful in my research, and my novel bears traces of all of them:
Bryher. The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs. London: Collins, 1963.
Colmore, Gertrude. Suffragette Sally. London: Stanley Paul, 1911.
Dehgy, Guy, and Keith Waterhouse. Café Royal: Ninety Years of Bohemia. London: Hutchinson, 1955.
Dickson, Lovat. H. G. Wells. London: Readers Union Macmillan, 1971.
Foot, Michael. The History of Mr. Wells. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Fromm, Gloria G. Dorothy Richardson: A Biography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
———, ed. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. London: Virago, 1982.
Hammond, J. R. H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences. London: William Heinemann, 1914.
MacKenzie, Norman and Jeanne. The Time Traveller. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973.
Maud, Constance. No Surrender. London: Duckworth, 1911.
McAlmon, Robert. Being Geniuses Together. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938.
Murray, Brian. H. G. Wells. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Pankhurst, Emmeline. My Own Story. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914.
Radford, Jean. Dorothy Richardson. New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Ray, Gordon N. H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
Richardson, Dorothy. Journey to Paradise. London: Virago, 1989.
Rosenberg, John. Dorothy Richardson, The Genius They Forgot. London: Duckworth, 1973.
Skinner, Cornelia Otis, and Emily Kimborough. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. London: Constable, 1944.
Smith, David C. H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
Swinnerton, Frank. Swinnerton: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1937.
Wells, H. G. H. G. Wells in Love. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
———. Mr. Britling Sees It Through. London: Cassell, 1916.
———. The New Machiavelli. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.
———. The Passionate Friends. London: Macmillan, 1914.
———. The Research Magnificent. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1916.
West, Anthony. H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. London: Hutchinson, 1984.
The following passages are quoted directly from other works:
H. G. Wells quoted article in Chapter 6 (passage beginning “We are going to write about it all”): from “The Contemporary Novel,” Fortnightly Review, November 1911. Reprinted in An Englishman Looks at the World. London: Cassell, 1914.
Letter from Jane to Wells in Chapter 8: from Jane Wells to H. G. Wells, February 26, 1906, quoted in Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal and also in MacKenzie, The Time Traveller.
The Spectator article quoted in Chapter 11: from The Spectator, October 10, 1907.
Passage in Chapter 13 (beginning “Miriam l
eft the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs.”): from opening of Pointed Roofs, the first volume of Pilgrimage.
Reviews of Pilgrimage in Chapter 19: from The Spectator, 1921; Frank Swinnerton, foreword to Pilgrimage; Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, quoted in Rosenberg’s Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot.
About the Author
LOUISA TREGER, a classical violinist, studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher. She subsequently turned to literature, earning a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship and the Rosa Morison Scholarship “for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature.” The Lodger is her first novel.
Visit her Web site at www.louisatreger.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Treger, Louisa.
The lodger: a novel / Louisa Treger.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-05193-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-5265-5 (e-book)
1. Women—England—London—Fiction. 2. Boardinghouses—England—London—Fiction. 3. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 4. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 5. Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866–1946—Fiction. 6. London (England)—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6120.R44L63 2014
823'.92—dc23
2014022422
e-ISBN 9781466852655
First Edition: October 2014
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