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
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
Friends, Associates Stella Benson
SB , recently re-established in London, met there May Sinclair , William Gerhardi , and Rose Macaulay .
Grant, Joy. Stella Benson: A Biography. Macmillan.
239
Friends, Associates Evelyn Underhill
EU and her husband led active social lives, often entertaining friends and colleagues at their home. Blanche Alethea Crackanthorpe introduced her to Marie Belloc Lowndes , who became a friend of Underhill and called her...
Friends, Associates Phyllis Bottome
PB was introduced to Ezra Pound (as half American) by May Sinclair at one of her parties in London.
Bottome, Phyllis. The Challenge. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
381-2
Intertextuality and Influence Dorothy Richardson
DR 's effect on other writers has been estimated as very strong. Those she influenced include May Sinclair (whose novel Mary Olivier was also serialised in the Little Review), Romer Wilson , and C. A. Dawson-Scott
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Evelyn Underhill
The Dial made much of The Grey World's similarity to May Sinclair 's The Divine Fire (published the same year), in that both concern certain special people endowed with an ability to see a...
Leisure and Society Amber Reeves
Soon after she came down from Cambridge the novelist Walter Lionel George met AR at a London party also attended by Ford Madox Hueffer , Wyndham Lewis , May Sinclair , and Violet Hunt ...
Literary responses Emily Brontë
Since the early criticism which took its lead from Charlotte's biographical portrait, a biographical and hagiographic industry has arisen around all three Brontë sisters and their home in Haworth. A. Mary F. Robinson published...
Literary responses Dorothy Richardson
In a review of DR 's first three novels, published in the Little Review and The Egoist in April 1918, May Sinclair used the label stream of consciousness to describe Richardson's technique. Sinclair borrowed the...
Literary responses Charlotte Mew
May Sinclair thought Madeleine magnificent, having depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
191
She also enjoyed the high Victorian melodrama of Mew's reading aloud.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
192
Despite her efforts to bring The Farmer's...
Literary responses Rose Allatini
Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of...
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
Literary responses Stella Benson
Forty-six years after Benson's death, Naomi Mitchison acknowledged that her work had ceased being read, that her fantasy was misunderstood as whimsy. She felt, however, that in 1979 a revival was due.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
127
It is...
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...

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.