May Sinclair in Her Time

May sinclair has been typically considered as a liminal author, positioned
between two eras: the 19th and the 20th centuries, Victorian culture and
modernism, traditional and avant-garde writing and thinking. As a result,
traditional criticism has confined her to the margins of 20th-century
literature and philosophy. Re-examining Sinclair’s involvement in the literary
and philosophical debates of her time, this collaborative volume seeks to
challenge this liminal status and to reassert Sinclair’s role as an author,
critic and thinker firmly established within her time. Leading experts in
philosophy and in criticism on May Sinclair thus investigate her presence on
the literary scene, her dialogues with her contemporaries (e.g. Dorothy
Richardson, H.D., Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce) and her engagement with
topical issues such as heredity, women’s rights and mysticism, as well as with
modernist paradigms such as the epiphany. In light of these new analyses,
rather than being uncomfortably situated between two eras, Sinclair emerges as
fully in and of her time, engaged in a constant conversation with fellow
thinkers, writers, and artists. On a larger scale, this reappraisal of
Sinclair’s fruitful connections with her peers invites us to go beyond the
conventional divide opposing Victorian and modernist writing, and to
participate in the current dynamics in criticism that aims to offer a more
inclusive and accurate definition of the intellectual scene in early-20th-
century Britain.