Conclusion

Summary

Pilgrimage is not a künstlerroman; Miriam Henderson will not grow up like Marcel to write the novel in which she is a character. And yet reading is a central feature of her upbringing in much the way it might be if she was destined to become an author, tied to a developing sense of herself as distinct from the mundane world around her. In Backwater, she feels trapped in a North London world she detests, but the experience is partly redeemed when she discovers a library and immerses herself in a set of texts that, despite predating its coinage, nevertheless embody the idea of the feminine middlebrow: novels by women such as the writer of light romantic fiction, Mrs. Hungerford, and, most crucially, the scandalous Ouida. Ouida’s novels, famous for what Joseph Bristow calls their “sensational plots and stylistic superfluities,” were the subject of some controversy in the late nineteenth century, as Bristow amply demonstrates.¹ Critics admired their invention but were relatively unanimous in declaring them without artistic merit.