Mary Olivier: A Life [Hardcover]

May Sinclair (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1972

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 380 pages
• Publisher: Greenwood Pub Group (November 1972)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0837162440
• ISBN-13: 978-0837162447
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,688,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Edwardian Theatre, August 1, 2002

By 

Jim Stewart (Western Australia.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mary Olivier: A Life (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

May Sinclairs novel is a subtle and quite devastating disection of a females life in the Victorian era. Stifled by a rigid sense of what it is important for a girl to aspire to, the sensitve and independent character of Mary Olivier strives to find her own answers to lifes mysteries. She cannot ask anyone about literature, Arts or the more (for her) burning philosophical questions of meaning and substance. When she does she is early on taken to task by the very men she assumed would assist her. This is the key to the subtlety of the dialogue between Mary and her male friends.Considerable time is also taken up with Mary's relationship with her family members. This a satisfying book and the reader will be richly rewarded in following the life of Mary Olivier.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb (if flawed) modernist Bildungsroman, July 4, 2002

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mary Olivier: A Life (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

MARY OLIVIER: A LIFE came out serialized in the same issues of THE LITTLE REVIEW as James Joyce's ULYSSES, and has never received its proper due for its achievement. part of this may also stem that it was written ten to fifteen years after the great spate of Edwardian parricidal Bildungsromans, which include Joyce's PORTRAIT, Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS, Maugham's OF HUMAN BONDAGE, Bennett's CLAYHANGER and Butler's THE WAY OF ALL FLESH. Yet MARY OLIVIER deserves at the very least to be in such fine company. May Sinclair herself coined the term "stream-of-consciousness" to describe the technique of Dorothy Richardson, and she uses this technique herself here in recounting the life of a young woman from the Victorian Sixties to late middle age. The results are astonishing: it may remind you a bit of Joyce's PORTRAIT, and a bit of Katherine Mansfield's Burnell Family stories, but it's also like neither of them. Mary and her brothers must revolt against their father's jealous possessiveness of his wife and their mother's sweet manipulations and doctrinaire piety, but they can never bring themselves to fully hate them. they realize that their parents are also actual people, flawed and yearning to love, and Sinclair outstrips many other writers of Bildungsromans by giving the parents their due. The last third of the book (after the father dies) is a bit tedious, but the novel is a real triumph, especially in its presentation of the way children think about their parents, the world around them, and even philosophical matters.