Mary Amelia St. Clair was a popular British author and suffragist, as well as a critic of poetry and prose. She was acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West. The term "stream of consciousness" in the literary sense is attributed to her.
Mr. Waddington of Wyk is one of twenty novels she produced in addition to six collections of short stories, two books of philosophy, poetry, journalism, and criticism. It's a social comedy, along with her title "A Cure of Souls," using humor to illustrate its commentary on society and those in it.
Sinclair's work has been rediscovered in recent years. Critic see Sinclair's work as a challenge to the critical categories of modernism, and as a rich and interesting response to early twentieth-century conceptions of femininity.
