[3] Pilgrimage was read as a work of fiction and "its critics did not suspect that its content was a reshaping of DMR's own experience", nor that it was a roman à clef.
[8] At 17 years old Miriam Henderson, as Richardson herself did, teaches English at a finishing school in Hanover, Germany.
[9] The following year, 1916, Richardson published Backwater, where Miriam "works as resident governess in a school frequented by the daughters of the North London middle class".
In it Miriam starts on a more independent life when she takes a room in Bloomsbury in central London at 21, and works as a receptionist at a dental surgery.
"[12] On the other hand, an "elderly male reviewer," for The Spectator found it disturbing that "Miss Richardson is not concerned with the satisfaction of the average reader".
Una Hunt, in a review for The New Republic, referred to her "intense excitement in reading this novel," and calls Deadlock "an experience rather than a book.
"[16] Richardson's interest in philosophical theories and ideas is central to Deadlock, though "metaphysical questions about the nature of being and of reality pervade Pilgrimage as a whole", In Deadlock, however, "Richardson first shows philosophical ideas and inquiry taking persistent and organized shape in Miriam’s maturing thought", when she "attends a course of introductory lectures by the British Idealist philosopher John Ellis McTaggart", with her fellow lodger Michael Shatov, She discusses with him "the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche" amongst other things.
[17] Shatov is based on Benjamin Grad, the son of a Jewish lawyer in Russia, who lived in 1896 in the same lodging as Richardson on Endesleigh Street, Bloomsbury, London.
[18] Revolving Lights was published in 1923, and in it Miriam's friendship continues with Michael Shatov, though she has rejected marriage.
Miriam also has a long holiday at the seaside home of Hypo and Alma Wilson, who are based on H. G. Wells and his wife Amy.
It "focuses on the experience and influence of travel and new surroundings, celebrating a state of intense wonder—'the strange happiness of being abroad.