The Lodger: A Novel (27 page)

There are several episodes in
Pilgrimage
that are treated in a strangely oblique—almost perfunctory—manner, as though too painful, or shaming, to be voiced. Most striking among these is Dorothy’s mother’s suicide. Dorothy conveys this dramatic and tragic event by a blank space on the page. Evidently it was so unbearable, she literally lacked the words to describe it; she does not provide a single detail, and the reader scarcely knows what has happened without the supplementary biographical facts. Dorothy’s account of her miscarriage is nearly as evasive: she presents it as a phantom pregnancy. Similarly, the sexual nature of the relationship with Veronica Leslie Jones is never explicit—Dorothy simply refers to nights spent together. These omissions—or repressions—form a significant part of my account; indeed, imagining and coloring them in was the most engrossing part of writing about Dorothy’s life.

The following works were also immensely useful in my research, and my novel bears traces of all of them:

Bryher.
The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs
. London: Collins, 1963.

Colmore, Gertrude.
Suffragette Sally
. London: Stanley Paul, 1911.

Dehgy, Guy, and Keith Waterhouse.
Café Royal: Ninety Years of Bohemia
. London: Hutchinson, 1955.

Dickson, Lovat.
H. G. Wells.
London: Readers Union Macmillan, 1971.

Foot, Michael.
The History of Mr. Wells
. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Fromm, Gloria G.
Dorothy Richardson: A Biography
. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

———, ed.
Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson
. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Hall, Radclyffe.
The Well of Loneliness
. London: Virago, 1982.

Hammond, J. R.
H. G. Wells and Rebecca West
. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Lytton, Constance.
Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences
. London: William Heinemann, 1914.

MacKenzie, Norman and Jeanne.
The Time Traveller
. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973.

Maud, Constance.
No Surrender
. London: Duckworth, 1911.

McAlmon, Robert.
Being Geniuses Together
. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938.

Murray, Brian.
H. G. Wells
. New York: Continuum, 1990.

Pankhurst, Emmeline.
My Own Story
. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914.

Radford, Jean.
Dorothy Richardson
. New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Ray, Gordon N.
H. G. Wells and Rebecca West.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.

Richardson, Dorothy.
Journey to Paradise
. London: Virago, 1989.

Rosenberg, John.
Dorothy Richardson, The Genius They Forgot
. London: Duckworth, 1973.

Skinner, Cornelia Otis, and Emily Kimborough.
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
. London: Constable, 1944.

Smith, David C.
H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

Swinnerton, Frank.
Swinnerton: An Autobiography
. London: Hutchinson, 1937.

Wells, H. G.
H. G. Wells in Love
. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

———.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through
. London: Cassell, 1916.

———.
The New Machiavelli
. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.

———.
The Passionate Friends
. London: Macmillan, 1914.

———.
The Research Magnificent
. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1916.

West, Anthony.
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life.
London: Hutchinson, 1984.

The following passages are quoted directly from other works:

H. G. Wells quoted article in Chapter 6 (passage beginning “We are going to write about it all”): from “The Contemporary Novel,”
Fortnightly Review
, November 1911. Reprinted in
An Englishman Looks at the World.
London: Cassell, 1914.

Letter from Jane to Wells in Chapter 8: from Jane Wells to H. G. Wells, February 26, 1906, quoted in Smith,
H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal
and also in MacKenzie,
The Time Traveller
.

The Spectator
article quoted in Chapter 11: from
The Spectator,
October 10, 1907.

Passage in Chapter 13 (beginning “Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs.”): from opening of
Pointed Roofs
, the first volume of
Pilgrimage
.

Reviews of
Pilgrimage
in Chapter 19: from
The Spectator
, 1921; Frank Swinnerton, foreword to
Pilgrimage
; Virginia Woolf,
A Writer’s Diary
, quoted in Rosenberg’s
Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot.

About the Author

LOUISA TREGER, a classical violinist, studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher. She subsequently turned to literature, earning a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship and the Rosa Morison Scholarship “for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature.”
The Lodger
is her first novel.

Visit her Web site at
www.louisatreger.com
.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2014 by Louisa Treger. 
All rights reserved. 
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
 
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

Cover photographs: cityscape © Tkemot/
Shutterstock.com
; woman © Lee Avison/Arcangel Images

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Treger, Louisa.
    The lodger: a novel / Louisa Treger.—First edition.
        pages cm
    ISBN 978-1-250-05193-6 (hardcover)
    ISBN 978-1-4668-5265-5 (e-book)
  1.  Women—England—London—Fiction.   2.  Boardinghouses—England—London—Fiction.   3.  Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction.   4.  Self-realization in women—Fiction.   5.  Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866–1946—Fiction.   6.  London (England)—History—19th century—Fiction.   I.  Title.
    PR6120.R44L63 2014
    823'.92—dc23
2014022422
e-ISBN 9781466852655
First Edition: October 2014