This morning I finished Deadlock, the 6th novel of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. Each of the series is better than the ones before. Deadlock feels substantively different, with Richardson going deeper into Miriam Henderson’s contemplation of practical philosophy, feminist metaphysics and theology.

As Richardson’s narrative becomes more abstract, her treatment of time thickens the narrative present; her way of using second-person interior monologue, the term Richardson preferred to stream of consciousness, captures so effectively this sense that one is observing another’s thought.

Although it becomes difficult to establish a chronology of time, Richardson advances her story despite this sense of disorientation, which matches those moments in life when so much is unsettled that time seems to race past, when one yearns for those duller times when time appears to stand still.