"Seen from Paradise" by Dorothy Richardson

At last, she has a place to get away from friends and family--just a cottage in Cornwall, but paradise to one trying to write in peace and solitude. And then friends go and write to say they're coming to invade her privacy with tub-plants and orders to fulfill (after all, it is their place). But, honestly! Read by Scoot. Time 13:57.

Don't you just love authors' bios which begin with the likes of "daughter of an impoverished gentleman"? And then "obliged to earn her own living" and "working as a secretary-assistant to a dental practice"? We mean, as if writers were like ordinary people or something! Not that we're not sorry to hear of Dorothy Richardson's mother's suicide in 1895, but we're more interested in learning how she beat James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and practically everyone else to the punch when it came to inventing stream-of-consciousness prose. It's nice to know, too, that good old socialist H. G. Wells (really, why have we neglected him for so long?) championed her cause and that she was fairly successful as a journalist in a day when such things were not so common. But a bit daunting, we admit, to be reminded that her massive novel series, Pilgrimage, took over her life after 1912. Only one of us here has read all thirteen (admit it--just a bit tedious!) books, but now at least another of us can say that he has read at least this one story, first collected in 1989 in Journey to Paradise.