Pointed Roofs, published in 1915, is the first work (she called it a "chapter") in Dorothy Richardson's (1873–1957) series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage,[1] and the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English.

The novelist May Sinclair (1863–1946) first applied the term "stream of consciousness" In a review of Pointed Roofs (The Egoist April 1918).

Miriam Henderson, the central character in Pilgrimage, is based on the author's own life between 1891 and 1915.

[2] In Pointed Roofs, seventeen-year-old Miriam Henderson has her first adventure as an adult teaching English at a finishing school in Hanover, Germany.

Richardson herself had left home in 1891, at seventeen, to take up the post of student teacher at a school in Hanover, because of her father's financial problems.