May Sinclair

Biography

May Sinclair (1863–1946), born Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair in Cheshire, England, was a British novelist, short story writer, and literary critic who became one of the more influential figures in early twentieth-century modernist fiction. She began publishing in the 1890s and achieved wide recognition with her novel The Divine Fire (1904), a portrait of a poet navigating artistic integrity and social ambition. Sinclair is credited with introducing the phrase "stream of consciousness" into literary criticism, using it in a 1918 Egoist essay to describe Dorothy Richardson's narrative technique in the Pilgrimage sequence. This contribution placed her at the center of debates about psychological realism and the representation of interior life in fiction. Her most formally ambitious works include Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), a novel tracing a woman's psychological development from childhood to middle age using free indirect discourse and fragmented chronology, and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), a compressed study of self-sacrifice and repression. The Three Sisters (1914), influenced by Charlotte Brontë's life and fiction, examines three daughters confined by a domineering father in a Yorkshire parish. Sinclair was also a serious student of philosophy, particularly German Idealism, and wrote The New Idealism (1922), a philosophical treatise engaging with Kant and neo-Idealist thought. She incorporated concepts from psychoanalysis into her fiction, drawing on Freud and Jung before such references became common in literary writing. Active in the women's suffrage movement, she served with a field ambulance unit in Belgium during the First World War, an experience she documented in A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915). She was associated with the Imagists and supported contemporaries including H.D., Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. In her final decades she withdrew from public life, affected by Parkinson's disease, and died in 1946.