May Sinclair

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Standard Name: Sinclair, May
Birth Name: Mary Amelia St Clair Sinclair
Self-constructed Name: May Sinclair
Styled: May Sinclair
Pseudonym: Julian Sinclair
MS , a major figure in the development of Modernism, wrote more than two dozen works ranging from novels (twenty-one of them), poetry, and collections of short stories to polemical pamphlets, philosophical treatises, translations, biography and a personal account of war experience. She was also a well-regarded book reviewer and literary critic. During her last decades she published nothing, and almost dropped from literary consciousness.
Oval black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of May Sinclair in semi-profile, c. 1912. She is wearing a white, embroidered dress or blouse with a high collar; her dark hair is pulled up in a loose roll with a bun on top.
Black-and-white photo of May Sinclair. She is looking down, and pictured in profile.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Cicely Hamilton
CH published a controversial article, Man, in The English Review; it provoked a response from May Sinclair in the July issue of the journal.
Whitelaw, Lis. The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton. Women’s Press.
121-2
politics Violet Hunt
Along with fellow author and suffragist May Sinclair , VH spent three days collecting funds for the WSPU at High Street Kensington underground station.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
134
Hunt, Violet. I Have This to Say. Boni and Liveright.
51-2
Friends, Associates Violet Hunt
Distraught over her split with Ford , VH was supported by several of her women writer friends, especially Radclyffe Hall , Dorothy Richardson , Ethel Colburn Mayne , May Sinclair , and Rebecca West .
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
251
Literary responses Violet Hunt
Her colleague and lifelong friend May Sinclair wrote an article for the English Review in 1922 praising The Novels of Violet Hunt.
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 197. Gale Research.
197: 183
Textual Features Violet Hunt
Focusing particularly on plot and dialogue (she was praised especially for her skill with the latter), her novels consider sexual and social relationships from an anti-romantic, feminist perspective.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
282
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 197. Gale Research.
197: 181
Writing in the English...
Literary responses Violet Hunt
Boots the chemist, which operated circulating libraries in its shops, refused to the stock this novel (as it already refused VH 's Sooner or Later) because of its alleged sensationalism.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
146-7
Secor, Marie. “Violet Hunt, Novelist: A Reintroduction”. English Literature in Transition, Vol.
19
, pp. 25-34.
29
VH received...
Friends, Associates Storm Jameson
Jameson met Romer Wilson , Charles Morgan , and J. W. N. Sullivan through her Knopf connections. By about 1924 she and Edith Sitwell had visited each other's homes. Jameson felt that in spite of...
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
This remarkable anthology brings to a wider audience poems by many otherwise unknown writers, as well as by, for instance, Vera Brittain , Edith Sitwell , Nancy Cunard , Cicely Hamilton , Rose Macaulay ,...
Education Margaret Kennedy
Notable women writers such as May Sinclair and Phyllis Bentley , a recent predecessor to MK , had also been educated there. Margaret would later recreate Cheltenham in The Constant Nymph as Cleeve College.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann.
25-6
Textual Production Margery Lawrence
ML 's ghost stories have been frequently anthologised. They appear in, for instance, Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told (1937), The Virago Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century (1987), and Vampire Stories (1993).
Clute, John, and John Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St Martin’s Press.
under Lawrence, Margery
Textual Production Rosamond Lehmann
At the time she began the novel, RL admitted that she had very little knowledge of contemporary women's writing other than May Sinclair 's. She dedicated this work to Dadie Rylands , who had advised...
Friends, Associates Marie Belloc Lowndes
Her literary friends of a generation before her own included George Meredith , Rhoda Broughton , and Henry James . She participated in the friendship of the two last-named by being regularly at Broughton's house...
Intertextuality and Influence Rose Macaulay
This novel is both social history and satire, covering territory similar to that of Virginia Woolf 's The Years and May Sinclair 's The Tree of Heaven. Like these, it traces the lives of...
Publishing Dora Marsden
Plans were afoot to relaunch The Freewoman shortly after it collapsed in its first form. When Marsden retreated to Southport for health reasons, Rebecca West acted as liaison between her and supporters in the Freewoman Discussion Circle
Textual Production Dora Marsden
Assistant editors were Richard Aldington and Leonard Compton-Rickett , and later H. D. (when Aldington went to war in June 1916) and T. S. Eliot (from July 1917). Contributors of creative work and critical reviews...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Sinclair, May. The Allinghams. Hutchinson, 1927.
Sinclair, May. The Combined Maze. Hutchinson, 1913.
Sinclair, May. The Creators. Constable, 1910.
Sinclair, May. The Divine Fire. Constable, 1904.
Sinclair, May. “The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism”. New World, Vol.
2
, pp. 694-08.
Sinclair, May. The Helpmate. Constable, 1907.
Sinclair, May. The Intercessor, and Other Stories. Hutchinson, 1931.
Sinclair, May. The Judgment of Eve. Harper, 1907.
Sinclair, May. The Judgment of Eve, and Other Stories. Collins, 1914.
Sinclair, May. The New Idealism. Macmillan, 1922.
Sinclair, May. “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson”. The Little Review, Vol.
4
, No. 12.
Sinclair, May. “The Poems of F.S. Flint”. The English Review.
Sinclair, May. The Rector of Wyck. Hutchinson, 1925.
Sinclair, May. The Return of the Prodigal. MacMillan, 1914.
Sinclair, May. The Romantic. Macmillan, 1920.
Sinclair, May. The Three Brontës. Hutchinson, 1911.
Sinclair, May. The Three Sisters. Hutchinson, 1914.
Sinclair, May. The Tree of Heaven. Cassell, 1917.
Sinclair, May. “Two Notes”. The Egoist.
Sinclair, May. Two Sides of a Question. Constable, 1901.
Sinclair, May, and Jean de Bosschère. Uncanny Stories. Hutchinson, 1923.