May Sinclair
Encyclopedia
May Sinclair was the pseudonym
of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 - 14 November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. She was also a significant critic, in the area of modernist poetry
and prose
; the literary term 'stream of consciousness' is attributed to her.
, Cheshire
. Her father was a Liverpool
shipowner, who went bankrupt, became an alcoholic, and died before she was an adult. Her mother was strict and religious; the family moved to Ilford
on the edge of London. After one year of education at Cheltenham Ladies College, she acted as carer for her brothers (four of five, all older and all suffering from a fatal congenital heart disease).
. Her works sold well in the United States
.
Around 1913, at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London, she became interested in psychoanalytic thought, and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud
's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization (which included Lady Dorothie Feilding
, Elsie Knocker
and Mairi Chisholm
) that would bring aid to wounded Belgian soldiers on the Western Front
in Flanders
. Due to shell shock
, she was able to endure only a few weeks at the front; she wrote about the experience in both prose and poetry.
She wrote early criticism on Imagism
and the poet H. D. (1915 in The Egoist
); she was on social terms with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington
and Ezra Pound
at the time. She also reviewed in a positive light the poetry of T. S. Eliot
(1917 in the Little Review) and the fiction of Dorothy Richardson
(1918 in The Egoist). It was in connection with Richardson that she introduced 'stream of consciousness' as a literary term, which was very generally adopted. Some aspects of Sinclair's subsequent novels have been traced as influenced by modernist techniques, particularly in the autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). She was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers.
She was a member of the Society for Psychical Research
from 1914. Some supernatural fiction
devices appear in her shorter fiction.
From the late 1920s she was suffering from the early signs of Parkinson's disease
, and ceased writing. She settled with a companion in Buckinghamshire
in 1932.
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 - 14 November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. She was also a significant critic, in the area of modernist poetry
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...
and prose
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
; the literary term 'stream of consciousness' is attributed to her.
Early life
She was born in Rock FerryRock Ferry
Rock Ferry is an area of Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula, England. Administratively it is a ward of the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral. Before local government reorganisation on 1 April 1974, it was part of the county of Cheshire...
, Cheshire
Cheshire
Cheshire is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although its largest town is Warrington. Other major towns include Widnes, Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow...
. Her father was a Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
shipowner, who went bankrupt, became an alcoholic, and died before she was an adult. Her mother was strict and religious; the family moved to Ilford
Ilford
Ilford is a large cosmopolitan town in East London, England and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Redbridge. It is located northeast of Charing Cross and is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. It forms a significant commercial and retail...
on the edge of London. After one year of education at Cheltenham Ladies College, she acted as carer for her brothers (four of five, all older and all suffering from a fatal congenital heart disease).
Career
From 1896 she wrote professionally, to support herself and her mother, who died in 1901. She treated a number of themes relating to the position of women, and marriage. She also wrote non-fiction based on studies of philosophy, particularly German idealismGerman idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
. Her works sold well in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
Around 1913, at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London, she became interested in psychoanalytic thought, and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization (which included Lady Dorothie Feilding
Dorothie Feilding
Lady Dorothie Mary Evelyn Feilding-Moore , better known as Dorothie Feilding, MM, CdeG, OLII, was a British heiress who shunned her aristocratic background to become a highly decorated volunteer nurse and ambulance driver on the Western Front during World War I...
, Elsie Knocker
Elsie Knocker
Elsie Knocker was a British nurse and ambulance driver in World War I who, together with her friend Mairi Chisholm, won numerous medals for bravery and for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers on the Western Front in Belgium...
and Mairi Chisholm
Mairi Chisholm
Mairi Lambert Gooden-Chisholm of Chisholm , OLII, MM, OStJ, OEB, was a Scottish nurse and ambulance driver in the First World War who, together with her friend Elsie Knocker, won numerous medals for bravery and for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers in on the Western Front in Belgium...
) that would bring aid to wounded Belgian soldiers on the Western Front
Western Front (World War I)
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...
in Flanders
Flanders
Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
. Due to shell shock
Combat stress reaction
Combat stress reaction , in the past commonly known as shell shock or battle fatigue, is a range of behaviours resulting from the stress of battle which decrease the combatant's fighting efficiency. The most common symptoms are fatigue, slower reaction times, indecision, disconnection from one's...
, she was able to endure only a few weeks at the front; she wrote about the experience in both prose and poetry.
She wrote early criticism on Imagism
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
and the poet H. D. (1915 in The Egoist
The Egoist (periodical)
The Egoist was a London literary magazine published from 1914 to 1919, during which time it published important early modernist poetry and fiction. In its manifesto, it claimed to "recognise no taboos," and published a number of controversial works, such as parts of Ulysses...
); she was on social terms with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...
and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
at the time. She also reviewed in a positive light the poetry of T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
(1917 in the Little Review) and the fiction of Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Miller Richardson was a British author and journalist.-Biography:Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883...
(1918 in The Egoist). It was in connection with Richardson that she introduced 'stream of consciousness' as a literary term, which was very generally adopted. Some aspects of Sinclair's subsequent novels have been traced as influenced by modernist techniques, particularly in the autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). She was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers.
She was a member of the Society for Psychical Research
Society for Psychical Research
The Society for Psychical Research is a non-profit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand "events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and to "examine allegedly paranormal phenomena...
from 1914. Some supernatural fiction
Supernatural fiction
Supernatural fiction is a literary genre exploiting or requiring as plot devices or themes some contradictions of the commonplace natural world and materialist assumptions about it....
devices appear in her shorter fiction.
From the late 1920s she was suffering from the early signs of Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...
, and ceased writing. She settled with a companion in Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
in 1932.
Works
- Nakiketas and other poems (1886) as Julian Sinclair
- Essays in Verse (1892)
- Audrey Craven (1897)
- Mr and Mrs Nevill Tyson (1897) also The Tysons
- Two Sides Of A Question (1901)
- The Divine Fire (1904)
- The Helpmate (1907)
- The Judgment of Eve (1907) stories
- The Immortal Moment (1908)
- Outlines of Church History by Rudolf Sohm (1909) translator
- The Creators (1910)
- The Flaw in the Crystal (1912)
- The Three Brontes (1912)
- Feminism (1912) pamphlet for Women’s Suffrage League
- The Combined Maze (1913)
- The Three Sisters (1914)
- The Return of the Prodigal (1914)
- A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915)
- The Belfry (1916)
- Tasker Jevons: The Real Story (1916)
- The Tree of Heaven (1917)
- A Defense of Idealism : Some Questions & Conclusions (1917)
- Mary Olivier: A Life (1919)
- The Romantic (1920)
- Mr. Waddington of Wyck (1921)
- Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922)
- Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922)
- The New Idealism (1922)
- Uncanny Stories (1923)
- A Cure of Souls (1924)
- The Dark Night: A Novel in Unrhymed Verse (1924)
- Arnold Waterlow (1924)
- The Rector of Wyck (1925)
- Far End (1926)
- The Allinghams (1927)
- History of Anthony Waring (1927)
- Fame (1929)
- Tales Told by Simpson (1930) stories
- The Intercessor, and Other Stories (1931)
External links
- A 2001 essay by Leigh Wilson (University of WestminsterUniversity of WestminsterThe University of Westminster is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom. Its origins go back to the foundation of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1838, and it was awarded university status in 1992.The university's headquarters and original campus are based on Regent...
), from The Literary EncyclopediaThe Literary EncyclopediaThe Literary Encyclopedia is an online reference work first published in October 2000 which, as of May 2008, offers freely available content together with full content and services for subscribing members. Articles are written by "nearly 2000 named scholars, most of whom are current university... - The Cellar-House of Pervyse (1917) at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
- We Brought Succour to Belgium (1914) at 'A Nurse at the War'
- May Sinclair and the First World War (Part 1) (1999) at National Humanities Center
- http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/images/raitt3.jpg&imgrefurl=http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ideasv62/raittb.htm&usg=__SWgYljo1LOSSU7LCvvFzPLwFi1g=&h=379&w=203&sz=11&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=G67OI7aj7ZmPtM:&tbnh=134&tbnw=71&prev=/images%3Fq%3DMay%2BSinclair%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26biw%3D1257%26bih%3D694%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=381&vpy=23&dur=85&hovh=303&hovw=162&tx=90&ty=155&ei=qImVTK6AGoj0swPa9oHlBA&oei=qImVTK6AGoj0swPa9oHlBA&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=35&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0May Sinclair and the First World War (Part 2) (1999)] at National Humanities Center
