This 1915 novel was the first in Richardson's thirteen-volume Pilgrimage series. Based on the author's own life, and full of stylistic innovations—such as stream of consciousness technique—this book led Virginia Woolf to praise Richardson for having created "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." It also launched one of the most remarkable, if undeservedly obscure, literary projects of the twentieth century. The book opens with our heroine, Miriam Henderson—a poor, open-minded, feminist-thinking, smoking, Ouida-reading, driven, seventeen-year-old.