May Sinclair

May Sinclair's The Creators is a study of a group of writers and would-be writers and their struggles and/or accommodations withing the literary marketplace. It deals with the trials and tribulations of literary celebrity and with lack of recognition. It also focuses on the doubts and self-divisions of the artist and on his or her battles with conventional gender roles. The novel's subtitle - 'a comedy' - puzzled some of its first readers and reviewers, the TLS to speculate that the comedy must lie in that fact that the creators believe that they are geniuses. Sinclair does not take her characters as seriously as they take themselves, but her social comedy also exposes the limitations of the conventional middle-class world which either exploits or fails to understand them. First serialized in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine between November 1909 and October 1910, The Creators was first published in book form by John Constable in 1910. This edition restored the numerous and extensive cuts that were made to Sinclair's manuscript during the process of the novel's serialization.

"In a few short pages," writes Francine Prose in her Introduction, "May Sinclair succeeds in rendering the oppressive weight and strength of the chains of family love." Young Harriett Frean is taught that "behaving beautifully" is paramount, and she becomes a self-sacrificing woman whose choices prove devastating to herself and to those who love her most. An early pioneer ofstream-of-consciousness writing, Sinclair employs the technique brilliantly in this finely crafted psychological novel. Evoking the style and depth of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair's haunting narrative also reflects her keen interest in the theories of Jung and Freud. The text of this Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery was set from the first American edition of 1922.

Originally published alongside Ulysses in the pages of the legendary Little Review, Mary Olivier: A Life is an intimate, lacerating account of the ties between daughter and mother, a book of transfixing images and troubling moral intelligence that confronts the exigencies and ambiguities of freedom and responsibility with empathy and power. May Sinclair's finest novel stands comparison with the work of Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, and the young Virginia Woolf. As a child, Mary Olivier's dreamy disposition and fierce intelligence set her apart from her Victorian family, especially her mother, "Little Mamma," whose dazzling looks cannot hide her meager love for her only daughter. Mary grows up in a world of her own, a solitude that leaves her free to explore her deepest passions, for literature and philosophy, for the austere beauties of England's north country, even as she continues to attend to her family. But in time the independence Mary values--at almost any cost--threatens to become a form of captivity itself.

Well, I'm glad my little girl didn't snatch and push. It's better to go without than to take from other people. That's ugly.'Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, renunciation of this unworthy passion initially brings her a peculiar sort of happiness. But the passing of time reveals a different truth. Ironic, brief and intensely realised, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) is a brilliant study of female virtue seen as vice, and stands with the work of Virgina Woolf and Dorothy Richardson as one of the great innovative novels of the century.

Born in 1865, Mary Olivier is the youngest of four children. Mamma dominates this Victorian household, idolising the boys, rejecting the independent love of her only daughter: the archetype of all women who control by weakness and suffering. Mary adores her mother- and she hates her. Ferociously intelligent, she vacillates between a passionate quest for her own artistic and sexual identity.This is one of the first novels ever written about a mother and daughter relationship, and the eternal conflict engendered by the deepest of ties. But it is a celebration too: for though Mary sacrifices her life- and her lover- to the demands of duty, she emerges victorious, finding in the discovery of her intellectual and feminine self an inner freedom, a perfect happiness.