May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern (review)

The novelist May Sinclair (1863–1946) was a well-known figure in the first quarter of the last century, both in Britain and beyond. During a career that spanned a period of unprecedented cultural, social, and political upheaval she published a total of twenty-one novels as well as short fiction, poetry, criticism, and philosophical writing. She was an active supporter of the campaign for women's suffrage, and was well-read in the ideas of Freud and Jung, being a founder member of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London. The writers of this volume suggest a number of reasons for her neglect in recent times: her position between early Victorian realism and modernism; the unevenness of her output, particularly in her later years when she was affected by ill-health (she wrote nothing after 1931); and the range of her writings which defy categorization.¹ The essays in the collection seek to rescue Sinclair from the limbo to which she has been consigned and argue for a re-evaluation of her contribution to the development of modernism. The book is divided into two parts: the first dealing with Sinclair's contribution to literary modernism and the second to her contribution to "the modern world."

In the first section contributors take up the opportunity provided by Sinclair's position between the Victorian and the modern, as reflected in the title of the volume, to revisit the evolution of modernism with all the complexities of its multi-faceted historical and cultural context. Michele K. Troy's wide-ranging survey of Sinclair's early reception in Europe demonstrates that French and German critics in general received Sinclair more favorably than their English counterparts, regarding in particular her treatment of female sexuality as a refreshing development in English writing. The following essays link particular elements of Sinclair's fictional output to developments within literary modernism and to major modernist figures. One of the most successful essays is Jane Eldridge Miller's discussion of Sinclair in relation to D. H. Lawrence. Miller effectively compares The Three Sisters (1914) and Sons and Lovers, demonstrating in what she terms the two writers' "breakthrough novels" their distinctive contribution to the development of literary modernism, based primarily on their "psychological and/or sexual realism."(p.77) Miller's essay takes on the issue of retrospective conceptions of modernism which she argues privilege purely formal terms, and cites this as a reason for the neglect of Sinclair's writing and of her connection with Lawrence. The formal and experimental is however addressed elsewhere, particularly in two essays which consider Sinclair's engagement with imagism in Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) (Laurel Forster) and the verse novel, The Dark Night (1924) (Jane Dowson). Of particular value is Forster's use of Sinclair's original notebooks to demonstrate the way in which the central character's psychology is presented rather than represented and distanced from both narrator and reader in a way quite different from the portrayal of consciousness in Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). Other essays connect Sinclair to H. D. (Diana Wallace) and Virginia Woolf (George M Johnson), although the latter essay is somewhat tendentious. To link Sinclair's The Tree of Heaven (1917) and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway on the grounds that they are both "strongly antiwar" is not in my view sustainable.(p.96) While it is true that The Tree of Heaven is more ambivalent about war than most critics have suggested, the essay ignores external evidence of Sinclair's prowar views, ignoring the complexities of prowar positions like hers.² Richard Bleiler's essay on Sinclair's two volumes of supernatural short stories is convincing enough—he reads them as linked sequences with a moral message—but it is perhaps disappointing that he makes no reference to recent research in the field of modernism and the Gothic.³

The second section discusses Sinclair in terms of the issues of her day, and...