Backwater (Pilgrimage, Vol. 2): Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Backwater (Pilgrimage, Vol. 2), credited to Dorothy Richardson, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Backwater (Pilgrimage, Vol. 2) by Dorothy Richardson. Read in English by Expatriate "Backwater" is the second volume of "Pilgrimage," a series of thirteen autobiographical novels by Dorothy Richardson considered to have pioneered the "stream of consciousness" technique of writing. In a review of the first volume in the series, "Pointed Roofs" (The Egoist April 1918), May Sinclair first applied the term "stream of consciousness" in her discussion of Richardson's stylistic innovations. Richardson, however, preferred the term "interior monologue." Miriam Henderson, the central character in Pilgrimage, is based on the author's own life between 1891 and 1915. Richardson is also important as a feminist writer because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. Her wariness of the conventions of language, her bending of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are used to create a feminine prose, which Richardson saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. Virginia Woolf in 1923 noted that Richardson "has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." In "Backwater," the quietly iconoclastic Miriam Richardson undertakes teaching responsibilities at a girls' school in North London; finding it to be impossible to conform to socially-acceptable interpretations of life, she anguishes over such issues as marriage, religion, the nature of happiness, and family relationships, while she begins to widen her horizons in the world. ( Wikipedia, edited by Expatriate)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Backwater (Pilgrimage, Vol. 2)
• Author credits: Dorothy Richardson
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 18
• Listed recording duration: 5:27:42

Catalogue topics

• World War I
• World War I Fiction
• women's literature
• wartime literature

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter 01, Sections 01-07 — 15:55
2. 02 - Chapter 01, Sections 08-12 — 13:52
3. 03 - Chapter 02, Sections 01-13 — 21:09
4. 04 - Chapter 02, Sections 14-20 — 21:46
5. 05 - Chapter 03, Sections 01-04 — 24:43
6. 06 - Chapter 03, Sections 05-08 — 20:16
7. 07 - Chapter 04, Sections 01-03 — 19:10
8. 08 - Chapter 04, Sections 04-05 — 15:02
9. 09 - Chapter 05 — 16:44
10. 10 - Chapter 06, Sections 01-05 — 21:02
11. 11 - Chapter 06, Sections 06-14 — 22:25
12. 12 - Chapter 07, Sections 01-05 — 14:38
13. 13 - Chapter 07, Sections 06-09 — 13:50
14. 14 - Chapter 08, Sections 01-03 — 14:48
15. 15 - Chapter 08, Sections 04-08 — 20:25
16. 16 - Chapter 09 — 12:31
17. 17 - Chapter 10, Sections 01-05 — 19:46
18. 18 - Chapter 10, Sections 06-15 — 19:39

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.