Sinclair,May

Abstract

May Sinclair was one of the most respected, intellectually connected, and widely read English novelists and critics of the early twentieth century. Comprising 21 novels, a novel in verse, numerous short stories, two books on idealist philosophy, a book on the Brönte sisters, a journal about assisting an ambulance during World War I, and dozens of literary reviews, Sinclair's vast oeuvre encompasses realist and experimental styles as well as thematic concerns with philosophical idealism, the loss of faith, the literary marketplace, new women, psychology, patriarchy, and the restraints of social convention that reflect her unique longevity as late Victorian, Edwardian, and modernist female writer. Sinclair's fiction engages the literary innovations of her time, beginning with novels that were socially rebellious in a realist mode and moving toward novels that experimented with narrative point of view and stream of consciousness, a phrase she famously used to describe Dorothy Richardson's style inPilgrimage(1915–38), thus creating a new critical vocabulary for understanding modernism. Most consistently, her fiction explores the social conditions and psychological conflicts that impede individual self‐realization.