Mary Olivier, A Life [Paperback]

May Sinclair (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2008

MARY OLIVIER A LIFE - 1919 - CONTENTS - BOOK ONE PAGE INFANC Y18 65-1869 . 1 BOOK TWO CHILDHOO 1D86 9-1875 . . 39 BOOK THREE ADOLESCEN C18E7 6-1879 . . 91 BOOK FOUR MATURIT Y18 79-1900 . 155 BOOK FIVE MIDDLEA GE 1900-1910 . . 329 BOOK ONE INFANCY 1865-1869 MARY OLIVIER A LIFE BOOK ONE INFANCY I THE curtain of the big bed hung down beside the cot. When old Jenny shook it the wooden rings rattled on they pole and grey men with pointed heads and squat, bulging bodies came out of the folds on to the flat green ground. If you looked at them they turned into squab faces smeared with green. Every night, when Jenny had gone away with the doll. and the donkey, you hunched up the blanket and the stiff white counterpane to hide the curtain and you played with the knob in the green painted iron ra, iling of the cot. It stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you had to feel for it with your finger. It fitted the hollow of your hand, cool and hard, with a blunt nose that pushed agreeably into the pam. In the dark you could go tip-finger along the slender, lashing flourishes of the ironwork. By stretching your arm out tight you could reach the curlykew at the-end. The short, steep flourish took you to the top of the railing and on behind your head. v .-Tip-fingkring backwards that way you got into the grey lane where the prickly stones were and the hedge of little biting trees. When the door in the hedge opened you saw the man in the night-shirt. He had only half a face. . From his nose and his cheek-bones downwards his beard hung straight like a dark cloth. You opened your mouth, but before you could scream you were back in the cot the room was light the green knob winked and grinned at you from the railing, and behind the curtain Papa and Mamma were lying in the big bed. One night she came back out of the lane as the door in the hedge was opening. The man stood in the room by the washstand, scratching his long thigh. He was turned slantwise from the nightlight on the washstand so that it showed his yellowish skin under the lifted shirt. The white halfface hung by itself on the darkness. When he left off scratching and moved towards the cot she screamed. Mamma took her into the big bed. She curled up there under the shelter of the raised hip and shoulder. Mammas face was dry and warm and smelt sweet like Jennys powderpuff. Mammas mouth moved over her wet cheeks, nipping her tears. Her cry changed to a whimper and a soft, ebbing sob. V Mammas breast a smooth, cool, round thing that hung to your hands and slipped from them when they tried to hold it. You could feel the little ridges of the stiff nipple as your finger pushed it back into the breast. Her sobs shook in her throat and ceased suddenly The big white globes hung in a ring above the dinner table. At first, when she came into the room, carried high in Jennys arms, she could see nothing but the hanging, shining globes. Each had s light inside it that made it shine. Mamma was sitting at the far end of the table. Her face and neck shone white above the pile of oranges on the dark blue dish. She was dipping her fingers in a dark blue glass bowl. When Mary saw her she strained towards her, leaning dangerously out of Jennys arms. Old Jenny said Tchittchit and made her arms tight and hard and put her on Papas knee. Papa sat up, broad and tall above the table, all by him self. He was dressed in black...

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 an alternate 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 an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Read Books (January 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1408619695
• ISBN-13: 978-1408619698
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,362,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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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)   

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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.