May Sinclair

May Sinclair was the pen name of Mary Amelia St Clair Sinclair, born on 24 August 1863 at Rock Ferry in Cheshire, the youngest child and only daughter of a Liverpool shipowner. Her father’s business failed and he drank heavily, and her parents separated. Her five older brothers all died before middle age, most of them from heart disease, and she spent years caring for her mother. Her formal education amounted to a single year at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where the headmistress, Dorothea Beale, encouraged her to study philosophy.

She taught herself the rest. She published poetry and philosophy, and then novels, the first of them in 1897. The Divine Fire (1904) was a success in both Britain and the United States. She became one of the most respected novelists of the early twentieth century and moved in modernist circles, befriending Ezra Pound and H.D. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, wrote on idealist philosophy, and was an early British supporter of psychoanalysis. In 1914 she went to Belgium with a volunteer ambulance unit and wrote about it. In a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels in The Egoist, she borrowed the phrase “stream of consciousness” from psychology and applied it to fiction, where it stuck. Her own best novels, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), use similar techniques. In the 1920s Parkinson’s disease ended her writing career. She died on 14 November 1946.

Both of her stories on this site come from Uncanny Stories (1923). Sinclair used ghosts to explore guilt, desire and what she thought the afterlife might be like. The Victim is about a chauffeur, his kindly employer, and a murder. It turns the usual revenge story upside down. Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched follows a woman, Harriott Leigh, through a secret love affair and past her death, into a hell that turns out to be repetition. It is one of the strangest and most original ghost stories of its decade, and the one to read first.