May Sinclair

A book review of James Thrall's: Mystic Moderns Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb. Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books/Fortress Academic , January  2020.  314 pages. $115.00. Hardcover.  ISBN  9781498583770.


A link to the Review: https://readingreligion.org/books/mystic-moderns

The two modernist women writers May Sinclair and Mary Butts seem to have very little in common on the surface of things: Sinclair was a prolific, semi-Edwardian and commercially successful author, whereas Mary Butts only published a few, very experimental works that never became particularly well-known. However, they both allowed religious experience and spiritual awakening to occupy a central place in their fiction. Sacrifice is a theme that is specifically utilised by both authors in a variety of ways. They were both interested in alternatives to established religion and explored mysticism and occultism, both in writing and in their personal lives. Additionally, they were engaged with feminist ideas and politics, both as authors and as private persons. This paper aims to show where and how these two women writers’ paths cross due to their mutual interest in religion and feminist ideas.
A comparison between Sinclair and Butts is made by looking at how the concept of sacrifice is applied in their fiction. My contention is that while Sinclair used sacrifice as a theme to explore individual spirituality and enlightenment, especially in Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) but in other works as well, Butts explored the communal tenets of sacrifice, in particular in the two novels Armed with Madness (1928) and Death of Felicity Taverner (1932). In this paper, I focus on the three above-mentioned novels as examples in order to investigate possible interconnections between feminism, spirituality and the theme of sacrifice in British modernism.

Drawing on social and environmental psychological research on place-identity and on the object-relation theory, this paper will explore the construction of spatial identification and identity formation in Sinclair’s Far End (1926).
In her introduction to The Closed Door, Sinclair’s description of Bosschère’s maison is reminiscent of her own fictionalisations: “it is essentially the thing that [man] builds around himself: it stands for the total of his nearest loves and interests; it is invested with his soul [...]. It is part of his personality”. The complex relations between masculinity and domesticity is indeed central in Far End. Sinclair’s eponymous home is first an idyllic, pre-war haven for Christopher, the male protagonist. As the first chapters recount his future wife’s first visits and marked interest in its mirrors, lights and windows, suggesting a metonymic blur between home and heroine, Far End is then seemingly forgotten as the couple moves to London to help Kit pursue his successful writing career. After a series of ordeals, the couple returns to their home but the isolation and peculiar, enduring influence of Far End have become inauspicious.
Far End is both peripheral and prominent in the couple’s life journey. Family life and relationship crises systematically happen in other homes, suggesting a strong sense of repression, displacement and censorship. Both protagonists also feel threatened by their house, which almost becomes a character in itself. A complex construct, Far End embodies the couple’s domestic delusions and diverging projections, it crystallises distortions and eventually deconstructs the prelapsarian symbiosis between husband, wife and home. Offering an interesting counterpoint to Woolf’s 1929 essay, it also echoes other Sinclairian homes where writing, always hindered or constrained, cannot fit in domestic life.

An overview of Edwardian Fiction that covers dozens of novelists dealing in a variety of genres, from the bildungsroman and children's literature to the short story and adventure fiction, and concentrating on a range of topics, from the suburban middle class and the working poor to marital woes and women's independence. Among the writers considered are Hardy, Wells, May Sinclair, Lawrence, Kipling, Forster, Mansfield, and Galsworthy.

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair's fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here.
In this paper, I attempt to show the ways in which sacrifice is approached in The Tree of Heaven. The paper discusses connections in the text between sacrifice, idealism and feminist thought, in order to shine a light on Sinclair’s effort of trying to make sense of the meaning of sacrifice in the lives of both women and men. To this end, non-fictional texts by Sinclair, such as Feminism (1912), ‘A Defence of Man’ (1912), and ‘Women’s Sacrifices for the War’ (1914) will be used as an ideological backdrop. It will thereby be shown how The Tree of Heaven demonstrates Sinclair’s struggle with sacrifice as a concept by means of the various discourses in which she is immersed: feminism, idealism and psychoanalysis. One example of this that is brought out in the paper is Dorothea’s involvement with and subsequent disgust of political activism.

Dorothy Richardson spent the majority of her writing career redefining the literary presentation of female creativity through a singular protagonist, Miriam Henderson, in the thirteen-novel sequence, Pilgrimage (1915-67). With each volume classified as a ‘chapter’ of the series, spanning over two thousand pages in length and narrated mostly through Miriam’s stream-of-consciousness, Pilgrimage distinguishes itself from Künstlerromane of the modernist period with its refusal to conclude the narrative. With this focus on expansion, rather than closure, Richardson resists the linear narrative found in the nineteenth-century novel of development as Miriam tries to maintain an uninterrupted state of artistic being.
Published in between the fourth and fifth novel-chapters of Pilgrimage, May Sinclair’s own female Künstlerroman, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) has often been compared with the series but, in contrast to Richardson, Sinclair separates her lengthy novel with chronological sections denoting specific periods of Mary’s life which reassert the narrative structure of developmental Bildung, or becoming, associated with the traditional realist novel of development. While these texts are structurally very different, I maintain both narratives challenge the enduring, and often oppressive, ideologies surrounding the figure of the woman artist as they radically redefine definitions of female artistry and the art object through their presentation of Miriam and Mary’s ongoing artistic consciousness and participation in the creative process.
This paper examines how both Richardson and Sinclair’s experimentation with the modernist Künstlerroman not only challenges the male-imposed stereotypes regarding women’s experiences and creative fulfilment at the turn of the century, but additionally offers an alternative, and imaginative, interpretation of the genre during the period. I will discuss the stylistic and thematic choices—whether stream of consciousness, the second person perspective, or through their representations of the everyday and the ordinary—that Richardson and Sinclair employ to investigate women and creative expression during the modernist period. Moreover, I wish to explore how their formal experimentation with narrative structure and the genre in this way suggests revised notions of selfhood, creativity and an altered sense of the reader and the reading process during the modernist period.