Well-tuned Mediums: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson

2009 ◽  
pp. 43-80
Author(s):  
Tatiana Kontou
Keyword(s):  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
May Sinclair

Sinclair, May (1863–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Marriage Problems ◽  
World War I Novels ◽  
May Sinclair

May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of her novels would most obviously be categorized as realist, she was a great advocate for the experimentation of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, and is perhaps most influential today as a literary critic of modernism; she was for example the first critic to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to literature. Her first commercial success came with her third novel The Divine Fire (1904), a philosophical novel combining a love story with an exploration and critique of the contemporary literary marketplace. Subsequent novels focused largely on social and/or marriage problems, prominent themes in literature of the period. A committed campaigner for women’s rights, her World War I novels (Tasker Jevons: the Real Story of 1916 and The Tree of Heaven of 1917) express her support for the war at a time when the suffrage movement was split between pacifist and pro-combat factions. She wrote two identifiably experimental novels, Mary Olivier (1919) and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), both significantly influenced by her interest in psychoanalysis.

Athenaeum, The

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimee Gasston
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Solid Objects ◽  
May Sinclair

The Athenaeum, "A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts," was published weekly in London between 1828 and 1921. John Middleton Murray was appointed as editor in 1919, recruiting Aldous Huxley as his assistant. The magazine featured cultural, scientific, and political commentary, reviews, literary gossip, as well as original poetry and short stories. Contributors included Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, and members of the Bloomsbury set, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry. Eliot produced essays such as "The Perfect Critic" for the magazine between 1919 and 1920 while working on The Waste Land, quoting writers like Joseph Conrad and James Joyce alongside canonical references. Mansfield was also employed regularly at this time, reviewing the work of contemporaries such as Woolf, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson, as well as collaborating on translations of Chekhov’s letters. The magazine was the first to publish Woolf’s short story "Solid Objects," and to host an early exposition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Writing Modernist Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Dynamic Potential ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
May Sinclair

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.

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