And I find it impossible to reduce to intelligible terms this satisfaction that I feel. To me these three novels show an art and method and form carried to punctilious perfection. Yet I have heard other novelists say that they have no art and no method and no form, and that it is this formlessness that annoys them. They say that they have no beginning and no middle and no end, and that to have form a novel must have an end and a beginning and a middle. We have come to words that in more primitive times would have been blows on this subject. There is a certain plausibility in what they say, but it depends on what constitutes a beginning and a middle and an end. In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson's stream of consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end. In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam's stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. No attitude or gesture of her own is allowed to come between her and her effect. Whatever her sources and her raw material, she is concerned and we ought to be concerned solely with the finished result, the work of art. It is to Miriam's almost painfully acute senses that we owe what in any other novelist would be called the "portraits" of Miriam's mother, of her sister Harriett, of the Corries and Joey Banks in _Honeycomb_, of the Miss Pernes and Julia Doyle, and the North London schoolgirls, in _Backwater_, of Fräulein Pfaff and Mademoiselle, of the Martins and Emma Bergmann and Ulrica and "the Australian" in _Pointed Roofs_. The mere "word-painting" is masterly.... It is as if no other writers had ever used their senses so purely and with so intense a joy in their use. This intensity is the effect of an extreme concentration on the thing seen or felt. Miss Richardson disdains every stroke that does not tell. Her novels are novels of an extraordinary compression, and of an extenuation more extraordinary still. The moments of Miriam's consciousness pass one by one, or overlapping; moments tense with vibration, moments drawn out fine, almost to snapping-point. Transcriber's Notes The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved. In "The Tunnel", Dorothy Richardson experimented with punctuation, in particular leaving out many commas, in order to promote "creative collaboration" with the reader. Therefore, punctuation was mostly left unchanged, as was the varying usage of hyphens. In a few cases, perhaps to mark Madame Szigmondy's pronounciation, "r" has been substituted by "g" ("pgonounce", "Thégèse", "rgun", "cgeature"). This seems to be intentional and has not been corrected.