May Sinclair: The Evolution of a Psychological Novelist

Abstract

Though interest in May Sinclair has revived within the last ten years (J. Miller; Pykett; Raitt), she remains the most undeservedly underrated novelist of the five under discussion in this book, and, indeed, of all Edwardians who made the transition into modernism. She once held a very different reputation, however. As her career peaked in the early 1920s, she was recognized as the best and most widely known female novelist (Boll, M.S.: Novelist 16). One critic, John Farrar, confidently asserted that Sinclair is “the greatest psychological analyst in fiction” (as qtd in Boll, M.S.: Novelist 16). Unfortunately, the amount of favourable criticism she received declined in proportion to her health in the later 1920s. She died in relative obscurity in 1946, having suffered for sixteen years from Parkinson’s disease which forced her to cease writing in 1931 at age sixty-eight. For most of the rest of the century, literary histories, such as Walter Allen’s and William York Tindall’s, at best accorded her brief mention, and at worst were dismissive and inaccurate.¹

I consider that the attitude of the modern novelist towards sex relations is more enlightened and more sane than that of those Victorian novelists who ignored this fundamental aspect of human nature. I don’t deny that his work is sometimes “unpleasant”; but it need not be.

— Sinclair, “Unpleasant Fiction”, Bookman (London), April, 1925: 6