‘Telling the day’ in Beatrice Potter Webb and Dorothy Richardson: The Temporality of the Working Woman

Abstract

In this article, the concept of ‘telling the day’, taken from the recent work of sociologist Jonathan Gershuny, is used as the starting point for a consideration of two texts which share as one of their key aims the accurate rendering of the working lives of women around the turn of the last century. These texts are Beatrice Webb's ‘Pages from a Work-Girl's Diary’ (1888), and a chapter from The Tunnel (1919), the fourth chapter-novel of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. I pay particular attention to the temporality of the way that these texts ‘tell the day’ of their working women protagonists. Apparently from very different genres (early participant-observation sociology, and literary modernism), this article both takes seriously the status of Webb's text as ‘literary experiment’, and argues for the productivity of seeing Richardson as engaging in kind of feminist sociology.