The Tunnel

The Tunnel is the fourth installment in in Dorothy M. Richardson’s pioneering sequence of semi-autobiographical novels, Pilgrimage. In this, the longest of the thirteen novels, Miriam Henderson moves to a furnished room in Bloomsbury, London, where she begins an independent life and takes on a job in a dental office. Echoing Miriam’s development, The Tunnel is more experimental and less tied to traditional chronological and narrative structure, providing instead a pure representation of Miriam’s stream of consciousness—a term coined by novelist May Sinclair to describe Richardson’s first three books. In her review of The Tunnel, Virginia Woolf called Richardson “one of the rare novelists who believe that the novel is so much alive that it actually grows.”