May Sinclair (1863-1946) was the daughter of a rigidly dogmatic
Christian woman and a failed shipowner who took to the bottle. She
attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she began a lifelong
study of philosophy, finding in the works of Plato, Spinoza, and
Kant a refuge from the religion in which she had been raised. In
1904 her novel The Divine Fire was a best seller in
America, and helped to make her reputation in England, where she
became known not only for her own vividly imagistic and
psychologically complex fiction but also for championing a range of
challenging new writers. She presented Ezra Pound to Ford Madox
Ford, encouraged the work of Charlotte Mew, protested the banning
of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, wrote an early
appreciation
of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other
Observations, and—in a review of Dorothy
Richardson’s Pilgrimage—introduced the term “stream of
consciousness” into critical parlance. A member of the Women
Writers Suffrage League, the Aristotelian Society, and the first
group to practice Freudian analysis in England, May Sinclair was
the author of poems, stories, essays, two works of philosophy, and
twenty-four novels, of which Mary Olivier: A Life was her
favorite.
Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The
Nation. She is the author of a book of poems, Antarctic
Traveller, and two prose collections, Reasonable Creatures:
Essays on Women and Feminism and Subject to Debate: Sense
and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.
This extraordinary novel translates traditional novelistic
materials into an interiorized modernist narrative with utmost
inclusiveness. It makes a savage, ironical analysis of Victorian
family life that can be set alongside The Way of All
Flesh, Father and Son, To the Lighthouse, or The
Fountain Overflows No one will be able to ignore May Sinclair
again.
— Hermione Lee, The Times Literary Supplement
May Sinclair’s great literary works tell of the inner lives of
quiet women.
— Joanna Griffiths, London Review of Books
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