May Sinclair

Biography

May Sinclair was born in 1863 in Rock Ferry, Chesere. She was the youngest of six, and was initially raised in a comfortable middle-class family until her father’s business failed, forcing them to file for bankruptcy. From that point, her father gradually grew into alcoholism. Her mother, on the other hand, was an “unimaginative and inflexible woman” who took religious orthodoxy to the point of tyranny (Bowler). Her parents separated shortly after the business failed, and Sinclair stayed with her mother. Trapped in a stifling environment and an unhappy financial situation, Sinclair turned to reading for survival as well as for education (Poetry Foundation).

Upon turning eighteen, she attended Cheltenham’s Ladies College. During that time, she published her first essays and poems in the college’s magazine. However, after only a year of college, she returned home for a variety of reasons, including financial difficulty and the need to care for her brothers. Four of her brothers suffered from a congenital heart defect, which eventually led to their premature deaths. Sinclair worked to support herself with her own writing, teaching, and translation. She published her first book, Audrey Craven, in 1897, just one year after moving to London. However, it wasn’t until her mother—who lived with her after suffering enormous health challenges—passed away in 1901 that Sinclair, parentless and with only one surviving sibling, suddenly found herself “alone and free” (Bowler).

That freedom marked the beginning of a prestigious publishing career for Sinclair. When she published The Divine Fire in 1904, the “schematically philosophical novel” briefly launched her into international celebrity and led her on a tour across the U.K. and the United States (Domestico). Upon her return, she became highly engaged with the women’s suffragette movement. This bled into her writing, not only in her articles published in women’s magazines, but also in novels that she wrote which examined and critiqued marriage, such as Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson (Poetry Foundation). She also had an ongoing fascination with the Brontë sisters and published several novels on them, the most prominent among them being The Three Sisters in 1914. It is considered to be her first psychological novel. (Blumberg et al.).

She became engaged with the Medico-Psychological Clinic in 1913 and remained close to it during the duration of World War I. She donated generously to funds for nerve-shocked soldiers and worked to raise funds for the clinic. During the war, she briefly stayed in Belgium in a determination to help with the war effort. Her written observations in her Journal of Impressions in Belgium were among the first published war journals written from a woman’s perspective in Britain (Bowler).

After the war, Sinclair delved deeply into stream-of-consciousness narratives, Freudian psychology, and experimentation. Her book Mary Oliver: A Life was loosely autobiographical and contained each of these elements (Domestico). She continued to publish, with her crowning achievement of The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, being published in 1920. She was referred to as “the most widely known woman artist in the country and America” (Moult qtd. in Blumberg et al.).

However, after 1920, she began to show signs of Parkinson’s disease. She withdrew from the public eye and moved from London to Buckinghamshire to live with Florence Buckinghamshire as her companion and housekeeper (Bowler). She died a quiet death in 1946, but her work and writing in feminism, psychology, and history left a legacy of creativity, determination, and perseverance.