MAY SINCLAIR
May Sinclair
In a rash moment, recently, Michael Sadleir committed himself to the retrospective and prophetic assertion that there never had been a great woman novelist and never would be. The first part of that statement is, of course, open to argument; the second cannot be proved. If he had said the greatest novelists, so far, have been men, he would have been on safe ground; for I don’t think even the most politely complaisant master of the ceremonies would suggest that Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray should step back and allow Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot to lead this particular procession of the immortals. Which is not to say that these last are not great, but only that there have been greater.
Turning to living authors, if, so far as this country is concerned (and here we are not concerned with any other), the same order of precedence still obtains, the distance between the men in the first rank and the women in the second has, at least, sensibly diminished. Leaving Hardy apart in his incontestible supremacy, have we any novelists alive who are, on the whole, superior to Wells, Conrad, Bennett, Galsworthy? It is a question Time alone can decide with certainty, but fallible men must needs, meanwhile, make up their separate minds as best they can, and, for my part, I would answer in the negative. But should any one claim that there are four women novelists who, if they do not surpass, are equal in achievement with the four men I have named, I could not begin to deny it until I had read them all over again. So nice, so delicate a matter is not to be settled off-hand. Even such godlike judges as Gosse and Squire might well lay aside their thunder and lightning in face of it and be disposed to temporize.
For, relegating to outer darkness (where many of us would be willing to join them) all whose glory is nothing but a vast popularity and its accessories—think what a galaxy of women novelists there are and what sound and notable work the best of them have done. Of course who have been longest before the public, you have Lucas Malet, Sarah Grand, George Colmore, Mary Cholmondeley, Mary and Jane Findlater, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mary E. Mann; of those who began somewhat later, Elinor Mordaunt, Dolf Wyllarde, Violet Hunt, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, M. P. Willcocks, Peggy Webling, Mrs. Dawson Scott, Beatrice Harraden, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Phillis Bottome, Rose Macaulay, May Sinclair, Sheila Kaye-Smith; and of a still later day, Viola Meynell, Ethel Sidgwick, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Mary Webb, Clemence Dane, Rebecca West, G. B. Stern, Storm Jameson, M. Leonora Eyles, Stella Benson.... This by no means completes the list, and there is no reason for ending it here except that it is long enough and contains a sufficient number of names for whomsoever will to select from it four whose work may fairly challenge comparison with the greatest that has been done by contemporary novelists of the other sex.
Any adequate survey of the modern English novel would, at all events, have to take into account most of the women writers I have mentioned, but for my present less ambitious occasions I am contented to limit my record to two—May Sinclair and Sheila Kaye-Smith—whom I take to be generally representative of such of them as are still in the full tide of their careers: the latter as having acquaintance with the larger variety of human character and giving breadth, color and fullness of life to her stories out of a wider, robuster interest in the multifarious affairs that absorb so much of the thought and activities of men; the former as being the subtler artist both in psychology and style.
As long ago as 1916, the distinguished American critic, Dr. Lyon Phelps, described Miss Sinclair as “to-day the foremost living writer among English-speaking women.” He rightly dated her rise to this eminence from the publication of “The Divine Fire,” in 1904, and as rightly reminded us that “the British audience for whom it was intended paid no attention to it” till it had been acclaimed by critics and read with enthusiasm by thousands of readers in America. Why Miss Sinclair had to wait eight years for that recognition I cannot explain. She adventured into literature in orthodox fashion by publishing two volumes of verse early in the ’nineties. Her first novel, “Audrey Craven,” appeared in 1896. Then came, with longish intervals between, “Mr. and Mrs. Nevil Tyson” and “Two Sides of a Question.” These three books were touched with something of the grey realism that prevented Gissing from becoming popular with a public which, then more than now, disliked novels of that hue and preferred its fiction to be either elevating or pleasantly entertaining. But if there was no run on these three books at the libraries, they did not pass, unless my memory misleads me, without due meed of praise from the more discriminating reviews; and, as Miss Sinclair has done far finer work since “The Divine Fire,” so I think she did truer, finer work before that in, at least, the second of her three earlier volumes. It were harder to say why the laurels fell upon the fourth than why they missed the second.
Rock Ferry, in Cheshire, was Miss Sinclair’s birthplace, but when fame discovered her she had been living some years at Hampstead, in London, and “The Divine Fire” moves among London literary circles, sketches cleverly various literary types of character and life in boarding-houses round about Bloomsbury, with for central figure a young Cockney poet, a kind of new Keats, who worked as a shop-assistant, wrote exquisite verse, had all the instincts of a gentleman, but was afflicted with a deplorable habit of dropping his aitches. So much is made of this weakness (which was really only as superficially significant as was Stevenson’s inability to spell certain words correctly) that the frequent insistence on it comes by degrees to seem a little finicking, a little irritating. I do not share Dr. Phelp’s fancy that Charlotte Bronte returned to earth to write “The Divine Fire.” Miss Sinclair may have learned things from Charlotte Bronte; she has written ably and searchingly of her in “The Three Brontes”; but influence from that source—even from the Charlotte of “Shirley” days—is scarcely traceable in any of her books and certainly does not, in “The Divine Fire,” dominate her own quietly distinctive personality.
Few authors owe their popularity to their best work, and, at the risk of appearing heretical, I will admit I have always counted “The Divine Fire” as one of Miss Sinclair’s unsuccessful experiments, and “The Helpmate” as another. Both have charm and distinction of style, but they have not the insight, the clearness of vision, that mark her later novels. She is, especially in the second, like an artist drawing without models and erring in small details, getting the anatomy of her characters here and there out of proportion. The cleverness and the interest of “The Helpmate” are undeniable, but its people do not wear flesh about them; they are seriously presented, but one feels they are as outside the world of actual humanity as are the brilliant creations that play so deftly in some of the artificial comedies of the Restoration.
“The Creators” is another tale of literary life, and one in which you are not always sure whether the author wishes you to take her poets and novelists in dead earnest or whether she is secretly laughing at them and touching off their idiosyncrasies with a covert irony, the latter suspicion finding encouragement in the neat realism and hard-cut brilliance with which the whole thing is done. Some have complained that several of her novels are too preoccupied with the mysteries and intimacies of sexual relationship, but you might as reasonably complain that other authors exclude these from their scheme of things and are too preoccupied with other and less vitally human experiences. There is no forbidden tree in the garden of literature; all the world is the artist’s parish and he is justified of any theme so long as he can handle it with such artistic success as Miss Sinclair does in “Kitty Tailleur,” in “The Combined Maze,” and in that tragically poignant short story “The Judgment of Eve.”
Perhaps she reaches the highest expression of her genius in this and other of her short stories (“The Wrackham Memoirs” is a little masterpiece of ironic comedy) and in the shortest of her novels, “The Life and Death of Harriet Frean”—the detached pity, the insight, the minute, illuminating realism with which the whole feeble, self-sacrificing, sentimental little soul of Harriet is revealed, and the perfect technique with which it is all set down, give power and beauty to what in less skilled, less sensitive hands might have been a frail, wistful story of no particular significance.
Miss Sinclair is more erudite than the majority of novelists and, outside the world of fiction, has proved herself a suggestive and original thinker in such philosophical subtleties as “A Defence of Idealism.” She worked, during the early stages of the War, with the Red Cross, recording her experiences in “A Journal of Impressions in Belgium,” and she drew on those experiences for scenes in some of her novels, notably in “Tasker Jevons” and in that finer story of the same period, “The Tree of Heaven.”
Literary characters, the literary life, and sex problems enter pretty largely into Miss Sinclair’s novels, but she has never like so many of the successful settled down to run in a groove; she does not repeat herself. She has not accepted ready-made formulas of art but has been continually reaching out for new ways of advance. She was quick to see virtue in the literary method of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson and the possibilities inherent in the novel which should look on everything through the consciousness of a single one of its characters, and proclaimed it as the type of novel that would have a future. She may not have convinced us of this when she applied the method in the ejaculatory, minutely detailed “Mary Olivier,” but its maturer development in “Harriet Frean” demonstrated that it was a manner which could be used with supreme artistic effectiveness. All the same, the method is not so new as James Joyce; you may find the beginnings of it, employed less self-consciously, with more reticence and more humor, in the first and last novels of that very old-fashioned novelist William De Morgan.