May 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.
  • BirthName: Mary Amelia St Clair Sinclair
  • Self-constructed: May Sinclair
    She adopted the name May in the early 1890s.
    Zegger, Hrisey Dimitrakis. May Sinclair. Twayne, 1976.
    15
  • Pseudonym: Julian Sinclair
    Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.
    39

Milestones

24 August 1863

Mary (later May) Sinclair was born in a house called Thorncote in a new and elegant housing estate, Rock Park, in Higher Bebington near Liverpool.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
17

Spring 1882

The late-teenage MS (still known as Mary) published her first essay in the fifth number of the Cheltenham Ladies College Magazine: it was on Descartes .
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
26n38

April 1918

MS was the first to apply the term stream of consciousness to literature, in a review of Dorothy Richardson 's Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.
266

January-May 1919

Book One of MS 's modernist novel Mary Olivier: A Life was serialised in The Little Review; in the same year the whole work was published by Cassell .
Zegger, Hrisey Dimitrakis. May Sinclair. Twayne, 1976.
166
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.
122

September 1931

MS issued her final literary work, The Intercessor, and Other Stories; the New York edition appeared the next year.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.
303

14 November 1946

MS died at Bierton, Buckinghamshire, after a long period of silence and inactivity caused by Parkinson's disease; she had also suffered a stroke.
Zegger, Hrisey Dimitrakis. May Sinclair. Twayne, 1976.
14
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.
155
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
264-5

Biography

Birth

24 August 1863

Mary (later May) Sinclair was born in a house called Thorncote in a new and elegant housing estate, Rock Park, in Higher Bebington near Liverpool.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
17