May Sinclair's 1904 novel, The Divine Fire, made her a household name in both Britain and the US. From then on she was a prominent figure in many of the literary and cultural movements of her day. A committed if ambivalent feminist, she published in the suffragist journal Votes for Women, and was one of the first women in England to go out to the Belgian front in 1914. Towards the end of her active life, she wrote the celebrated modernist novel, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and the dense, macabre Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, the first book to appear on May Sinclair in nearly thirty years, draws on newly discovered manuscripts to tell the story of this woman whose emotional isolation bears witness to the great price Victorian women had to pay for their intellectual freedom.
