The Tunnel is the fourth installment in in Dorothy M. Richardson’s pioneering sequence of semi-autobiographical novels, Pilgrimage .

In this, the longest of the thirteen novels, Miriam Henderson moves to a furnished room in Bloomsbury, London, where she begins an independent life and takes on a job in a dental office.

Echoing Miriam’s development, The Tunnel is more experimental and less tied to traditional chronological and narrative structure, providing instead a pure representation of Miriam’s stream of consciousness—a term coined by novelist May Sinclair to describe Richardson’s first three books. In her review of The Tunnel , Virginia Woolf called Richardson “one of the rare novelists who believe that the novel is so much alive that it actually grows.”