May Sinclair

by Michele K. Troy, Andrew J. Kunka (Editor), Andrew Kunka

May Sinclair was a central figure in the modernist movement, whose contribution has long been underacknowledged. A woman of both modern and Victorian impulses, a popular novelist who also embraced modernist narrative techniques, Sinclair embodied the contradictions of her era. The contributors to this collection, the first on Sinclair's career and writings, examine these contradictions, tracing their evolution over the span of Sinclair's professional life as they provide insights into Sinclair's complex and enigmatic texts. In doing so, they engage with the cultural and literary phenomena Sinclair herself critiqued and influenced: the evolving literary marketplace, changing sexual and social mores, developments in the fields of psychology, the women's suffrage movement, and World War I. Sinclair not only had her finger on the pulse of the intellectual and social challenges of her time, but also she was connected through her writing with authors located in diverse regions of literary modernism's social web, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Charlotte Mew, and Dorothy Richardson. The volume is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the political, social, and literary currents of the modernist period.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published December 21, 2006

Reviews

[Kirsty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I uncovered May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern via an inter-library loan, and am so pleased that I did. It looked wonderful and far-reaching from the blurb which I found online; in reality, it was even better than I was expecting it to be. This is the first piece of Sinclair criticism which I have read, and I have a feeling that I began with the best I could have. Moving Towards the Modern includes a plethora of fascinating essays, which discuss different facets of Sinclair's work. It is a wonderful collection, which adds real depth to elements of Sinclair's fiction that I've not thought about before.

The highlights for me were Diana Wallace's essay on 'Love, Art, and Classicism in The Divine Fire', George M. Johnson's musings on the Great War in Sinclair's fiction, Laurel Forster's categorisation of Sinclair as an Imagist author, Jane Silvey's impassioned work regarding Sinclair's admiration for the Brontes, her involvement in the Suffrage movement as depicted by Philippa Martindale, Diane F. Gillespie's essay about "Physiological Emergencies" and "Suffragitis", Cheryl A. Wilson's thoughts about Victorian values versus the New Woman, and Andrew J. Kunka's critique of cowardice, gender and shellshock in two of Sinclair's novels.