Backwater

“In 'Backwater' Miss Dorothy Richardson continues the life story of a young English girl which she began in ‘Pointed roofs.’ Miriam Henderson was then -- many years before the war -- a teacher in a German school in Hanover. She is now home in England. She is just eighteen, 'has put up her hair today' in preparation for her career as a resident governess in a school for the daughters of gentlemen.... Miriam's is not a very large world. with its family of sisters, their chat! and slang and raptures, their music and books and friends and lovers. . . . Nor is there much incident in it -- the last gay little dance before the crash. the few weeks' seaside holiday at Brighton, the visit to the Crystal palace on firework night, and the raw, noisy, suburban routine at Wordsworth house. Miss Richardson’s tacit but essential assumption is that life is an intensely real and rich, a desperately complex and wonderful, experience, however commonplace its circumstances may be." --The Times [London]