.....[May] Sinclair was not only a critically-respected, popular and extremely prolific novelist, but also a poet, philosopher, translator, and critic. Her career, spanning from the late 1880s all the way to the late 1920s, produced 23 novels, 39 short stories, two philosophical treatises, one biography of the Brontës and several poetry collections.
She is perhaps vaguely recalled, by literature students at least, for her review of Dorothy Richardson's [books].... in 1918 in which she coined the literary version of the phrase "stream of consciousness", or alternatively her remarkably perceptive early review of TS Eliot's "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock". Less appreciated by most, however, is Sinclair's pivotal role in that early modernist milieu. She provided patronage to the young Ezra Pound and introduced him to Ford Madox Ford, an old friend of hers who as editor of the English Review would be the first to publish Pound's poems in England. She was good friends with Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells, Rebecca West and others, and was heavily involved with movements as diverse as women's suffrage, early psychoanalysis and imagist poetry.
These myriad influences are filtered and distilled in her fiction, which displays many of the tenets we would now deem to be modernist – stream-of-consciousness narration, temporal dislocation and discursive fragmentation – while at the same time remaining fundamentally readable. Sinclair's masterpiece, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean(1922), for example, tells the story of one woman's life from birth to death in a refreshingly short and accessible 160 pages. ....Harriett's life of self-denial is Sinclair's indictment of a society which demanded women should turn themselves into self-sacrificing nonentities obsessed with pursuing "moral beauty" instead of self-fulfilment. ...
The characteristically elliptical brevity of ...[her writing], Sinclair's experiment in translating imagist poetic principles to prose, can be seen as the precursor – or, depending on your point of view, the antidote – to the great and at times intimidatingly unwieldy modernist novels of the 1920s, Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses.
Yet, for all its merits, this is the only one of Sinclair's novels currently in print. The Three Sisters (1914) – an atmospheric re-imagination of the Brontë story – and Mary Olivier (1919) – a quintessentially modernist "portrait of the artist as young (wo)man" published just as Joyce, Richardson and Woolf were also making their first forays into stream-of-consciousness prose....have since dropped from view. Earlier novels such as The Tysons (1898), The Divine Fire (1904) and The Creators (1910) – the latter the first novel to represent writing as a potentially central occupation of women's lives – have never been reprinted, despite their consummate artistry and insightful social and psychological realism.
.....But there are glimmers of hope [despite the neglect of her books]. Sinclair's complete works are available on Project Gutenberg,.... Perhaps this archetypal modernist will be rescued by that most modern of inventions, the internet.
And there is also quite an excellent photographer who gave us this picture of the author.
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