Mary Olivier: A Life

by May Sinclair

Overview

First published in 1919, Mary Olivier is one of May Sinclair’s best-remembered novels. The youngest of four children and the only girl in her Victorian family, Mary Olivier faces formidable barriers: she will not be educated as her brothers, nor will she be afforded their freedoms. Held emotionally hostage to a calculating mother, Mary retreats into her imagination and into books. Rejecting Victorian formulas, she becomes a published poet and refuses to marry a succession of suitors. Yet she remains a dutiful daughter. Hers is a timeless story in which obligation and liberty, acquiescence and rebellion coexist in a fully realized, ultimately modern woman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781537814438
Publisher:	Charles River Editors
Publication date:	03/22/2018
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
Pages:	515
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

May Sinclair (1863-1946) was the daughter of a rigidly dogmatic Christian woman and a failed shipowner who took to the bottle. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she began a lifelong study of philosophy, finding in the works of Plato, Spinoza, and Kant a refuge from the religion in which she had been raised. In 1904 her novel The Divine Fire was a best seller in America, and helped to make her reputation in England, where she became known not only for her own vividly imagistic and psychologically complex fiction but also for championing a range of challenging new writers. She presented Ezra Pound to Ford Madox Ford, encouraged the work of Charlotte Mew, protested the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, wrote an early appreciation of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, and—in a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage—introduced the term “stream of consciousness” into critical parlance. A member of the Women Writers Suffrage League, the Aristotelian Society, and the first group to practice Freudian analysis in England, May Sinclair was the author of poems, stories, essays, two works of philosophy, and twenty-four novels, of which Mary Olivier: A Life was her favorite.

Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation. She is the author of a book of poems, Antarctic Traveller, and two prose collections, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism and Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.

Editorial Reviews

This extraordinary novel translates traditional novelistic materials into an interiorized modernist narrative with utmost inclusiveness. It makes a savage, ironical analysis of Victorian family life that can be set alongside The Way of All Flesh, Father and Son, To the Lighthouse, or The Fountain Overflows No one will be able to ignore May Sinclair again.
— Hermione Lee, The Times Literary Supplement

May Sinclair’s great literary works tell of the inner lives of quiet women.
— Joanna Griffiths, London Review of Books

From the Publisher