Pointed Roofs, published in 1915, is the first work (she called it a "chapter") in Dorothy Richardson's series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage, 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. 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.