This book deals with the life history and writings of three great female authors: Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, who all died relatively young. These three daughters of a poor country clergyman, published, at the beginning, their poems and novels under male pseudonyms, like many contemporary female writers; before to become famous all over the world. "It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead."...

Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read. This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter. - Reading time of the complete text: about 2 hours - Reading time of the summarized text: 11 minutes "The Life and Death of Harriett Frean" is a novel written by May Sinclair in 1922. The story revolves around Harriett, a woman who is so afraid of life that she avoids living it. Raised to be the ideal Victorian woman, Harriett takes pride in her self-sacrifice, believing it to be the highest form of love. However, when she falls in love with her best friend's fiance, she is forced to question her beliefs. Choosing not to follow her heart, Harriett spends the rest of her life trying to convince herself that she made the right decision. The novel has been described as a "small, perfect gem of a book" by author Jonathan Coe. It is the only May Sinclair novel currently in print and has been republished multiple times. Additionally, it was adapted into a BBC television show in 1986.

Trois filles de pasteur qui ne sont pas sans rappeler les soeurs Brontë, soumises à la sévérité de l'Angleterre rurale du XIXe, mais dont l'esprit s'enflamme au contact inopiné du docteur Rowcliffe... La redécouverte d'une grande romancière britannique, jadis comparée à Thomas Hardy ou Katherine Mansfield. Le roman retrouvé de la quatrième soeur Brontë" ! Mary, Gwenda et Alice Cartaret sont les filles du pasteur de Garth, un village du Yorkshire. Ce père despotique leur impose une discipline de fer et les trois soeurs étouffent sous le poids de la morale puritaine.Quand le docteur Rowcliffe arrive en ville, il apparaît comme le sauveur qui pourrait les sortir de leur isolement. Cet homme d'expérience éveille en elles une passion décuplée par une sensualité bridée.Alice, surtout, la plus jeune, semble incapable de dominer les tourments de sa chair. À tel point que l'on doit appeler à son chevet le Dr Rowcliffe. Lequel s'éprend de Gwenda, tandis que Mary, la plus sage, garde patience...Avec pudeur et mélancolie, May Sinclair décrit le délaissement de jeunes femmes soumises au joug masculin, et dont l'esprit brûle d'envies et de rêves. Un roman qui aborde le désir féminin avec la même acuité que ceux de Thomas Hardy ou D. H. Lawrence."

The philosophy of Idealism, revived in eighteenth-century Europe by George Berkeley, argued against philosophical materialism by maintaining that Reality is a creation of the Mind. Despite its flourishing under the leadership of Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Schelling, Idealism had definitely fallen into decline late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. May Sinclair, the writer of many popular but philosophically provocative novels and part-time World War I ambulance corps-person, was an unlikely one to take up the torch of the old school and try to revive it yet again for the twentieth century. Most notably, in this treatise she tried to formulate a union of Idealistic Monism with the New Realism as epitomized by Bertrand Russell and his mathematics-based philosophy. How successful she was is a matter for the reader to judge, but this volume and its sequel provide fascinating insights into the mind of Sinclair herself, helping the twenty-first century reader better to understand this highly significant author as she wrote in the very midst of the Great War.

May Sinclair's 1921 novel tells the story of the ridiculous Mr. Horatio Bysshe Waddington, a pompous, self-deluded poser making his way through life caring only for the impressions he makes on others. His long-suffering wife Fanny, his secretary Barbara, and the young scapegrace Ralph watch his daily performances with delighted, affectionate fascination as if they are spectators watching a play or scientists observing a new species, wondering every day how far he will go to fulfill his outrageous pretensions. As usual, Sinclair's light, deceptively innocent prose camouflages a tale of sexual passions and human foibles with philosophical implications about her post-war world.

Ranny Ransome is an idealistic young man, devoted to exuberant gymnastic exercises and to fighting "flabbiness" in his own life, body and soul. He loves the girlish and athletic Winny Dymond, and particularly loves participating with her in the Combined Maze, a choreographed, intricate, exhilarating group gymnastic ritual in which the young men and women of the Polytechnic Gymnasium demonstrate their skills. Unfortunately, Ranny falls under the spell of the seductive Violet, a sexual free spirit who wants nothing more than to live an untrammeled life on her own terms. When, to her astonishment and horror, Violet becomes pregnant, Ranny dutifully marries her against her will, entangling himself and her in a deadly new Combined Maze of social conventions intended to suppress and subdue the elemental passions that give color to Life. May Sinclair draws her readers in with a quiet, unobtrusive, Victorian prose that seems completely in tune with the conventional proprieties of her society, but goes on in the same seditious, unassuming tone to tell stories of sensuality, adultery, seduction, divorce, and betrayal, quietly protesting the smothering conventions of a society that feared passion in all its forms. Ranny's mesmerizing struggle to maintain his fundamental decency while remaining true to his real love hangs in the balance to the last page.

In 1914, at the age of 51, the novelist and poet May Sinclair volunteered to leave the comforts of England to go to the Western Front, joining the Munro Ambulance Corps ministering to wounded Belgian soldiers in Flanders. Her experiences in the Great War, brief and traumatizing as they were, permeated the prose and poetry she wrote after this time. Witness of great human pain and tragedy, Sinclair was in serious danger of her life on multiple occasions. This journal makes no attempt to be anything more than a journal: a lucid, simple, heart-breaking account of war at first hand.

This is one of the later works of May Sinclair - a prolific author, literary critic, and feminist activist - famous in Britain and the US after the 1904 publication of The Divine Fire. The Immortal Moment concerns the defining episode in the life of Kitty Tailleur, a beautiful and enormously charming but "fallen" woman, who yearns to become respectable. As ever, Sinclair uses irony and understatement to expose the hypocrisy of the social order by revealing the tragic social reality of women's powerlessness within it. While on holiday at a small seaside hotel Kitty attracts the love of a truly good man. Though good to the core, Robert Lucy, a widower with two young daughters, is emotionally undeveloped and naïve. Kitty's own maturity has been stultified by her circumscribed life as a mistress in the demi-monde. Yet their love is deep and passionate. They plan to marry, which Kitty hopes will liberate her from a life of sexual servitude and degradation. The story unfolds a series of potential threats to the consummation of their happiness, leaving the outcome uncertain to the last. Will Kitty fall victim to the gossip and hints of various guests at the hotel, who, less naïve than Robert, suspect her dubious past? Will her most recent lover betray her? How will the still dominant, still extreme Victorian prudery of the day influence the course of events? Can Kitty disregard the potential effect on Robert's little girls, should her secret become known after she has become their second mother? Or will love conquer all ? Several well-drawn secondary characters influence the course of events. These include Kitty's clinging but deeply repressed and everlastingly oppressed chaperone; Robert's imaginative, loving, almost saintly sister; and the influential and urbane man who, until recently, has "kept" Kitty.

Here are two gemlike novellas in one volume, written in May Sinclair's clearest and cleverest prose and exploring the many ways in which a woman can be held captive, held back from the "intoxication of freedom." In "The Cosmopolitan," Frida Tancred is a wealthy heiress trapped by family obligation in a dismal provincial estate, hopelessly longing to see all the glories of the world and with no way of escape but the conventional one of marriage. In "Superseded," spinsterish Miss Juliana Quincey has been teaching arithmetic in a London girls' school for twenty-five years when she suddenly falls in love with a much younger man and begins to question the assumptions of her life. So dramatically different in terms of characters, plot, and style, both novellas are united in a passionate quest of freedom and a like determination on the part of two very different women to achieve freedom on their own terms. The "Question" of which Sinclair is demonstrating the "Two Sides" seems to be this: Does a woman need a man in her life in order to define herself? In coming to her conclusions, Sinclair explores many layers of human life: art, philosophy, education, science, social class, religion. The marvel is that she is able to do all this in two such small, luminous novels.

Written in an era of cheap, formulaic romantic fiction, the nuanced, seditious, quietly erotic novels of May Sinclair stand out like literature from another era entirely. There is romance in "Anne Severn & the Fieldings," but it's romance of the best and profoundest kind, set in the context of authentic human personalities and tragic historical events. The motherless Anne Severn is adopted into the Fielding family and grows up in intimate friendship with the three Fielding sons, all of whom love her. World War I explodes into their lives with hideous effect, sending all three sons back damaged in one way or another. Anne herself sees the horrors of war as an ambulance driver, meeting along the way a "queer little middle-aged lady out for a job at the front" whom we recognize as May Sinclair herself, who volunteered for just such an adventure in 1914. Sinclair always was half-Victorian, half-modern, so it is no surprise to find her using subtle, lovely, dreamlike, decorous prose to undermine social conventions on all sides. Most startling, perhaps, is the unambiguous sexuality that complicates the lives of her characters, troubling marriages and consummating true love. She creates personalities about whom we care much more than we care about proprieties and social boundaries, and Anne Severn stands as one of Sinclair's most courageous and compelling heroines.

Jane Holland is a genius, the greatest of a group of extraordinary literary friends. She has an intense artistic and intellectual kinship with George Tanqueray, another remarkable novelist. Despite this keen spiritual relationship, both Holland and Tanqueray allow themselves to fall against their wills into more conventional romantic commitments, leading to agonizing crises of heart and mind and art. Another of May Sinclair's marvelous philosophical novels, this masterpiece explores the great dilemmas of artistic Genius and the obstacles posed to it by Love, by philistine society, by the two-faced allure of popularity, by human jealousy, by the conventions of marriage and family. More deeply, Sinclair here lays bare the excruciating choices required particularly of a woman genius, and the double standards applied to her in a society that allowed so much indulgence to a man considered to have such artistic gifts. Demonic or angelic, curse or blessing, affliction or joy, the involuntary gifting of Genius sets any human being apart from the uncomprehending and judgmental society in which she must live, a condition delineated in "The Creators" with delicate subtlety and fierce passion.

Fascinated as she was by the lives of the Brontë siblings, May Sinclair loosely based her subtly sensual, quietly insurrectionary 1914 novel The Three Sisters on the Haworth moor milieu of the three literary Brontë sisters. Alice, Gwenda, and Mary Cartaret are the daughters of the Vicar of Garth, an abusive father with rigid, selfish expectations for female behavior. Hope of rescue seems to dawn in the person of an idealistic young doctor in the village, but this is no Austen romance. Described with Edwardian restraint, it is still sexual passion that is the underlying theme of the story: the rebellion of human sensuality in almost every major character in the story against the artificial constraints of conventional Society and Religion. Sinclair, herself a fascinating hybrid of Victorian and modern, shows the desperate, inertial ennui inherent in the lives of unmarried late-Victorian women dependent on their male guardians but fired by dreams and desires of their own. Sinclair's gently seditious fiction is always deeply imbued with philosophy as well as human psychology, giving it rich layers of interest.

One of May Sinclair's "uncanny" stories, this novella explores many of Sinclair's most treasured themes: the bounds of marriage, the conflict between flesh and spirit, the complexity of human emotions in relation to other humans, the practical everyday implications of philosophical Idealism. In the story, when Agatha Verrall enters into an extra-marital affair with Rodney Lanyon, she struggles to keep the relationship on a spiritual plane without falling into the physical passion that she fears. To her astonishment, she discovers that she has an extraordinary paranormal ability to manipulate the psyches and even the physical states of the people around her. At first, she uses it in a way that seems harmless to her, coaxing the oblivious Rodney to visit her whenever she wants him. Before long, she learns that her powers have tremendous potential for good, for healing psychological disorders untouched by ordinary medicine. But the exercise of her Power leads to terrifying dangers for herself and her beneficiaries, proving that it might be beyond her ability to harness without vast harm.

May Sinclair's `Life And Death of Harriett Frean' tells the story of the titular character, Harriett, who has been raised as the embodiment of the perfect Victorian woman; loving, honourable, and obedient. She idolizes her parents and learns from childhood that love is equal to self-sacrifice but when she falls in love with her closest friend's fiancé, she is forced to question everything she thought she thought she knew. Described as a "small, perfect gem of a book" by author Jonathan Coe, this historical romance novella was adapted into a BBC television show in 1986 and is a brilliant study of female ideals that stands alongside works by Virginia Woolf. May Sinclair was the pen name of Mary Amelia St. Clair, born 1863. May was a popular British writer who wrote over 20 novels, short stories, and poetry. She was also an active suffragist, and a member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. Her activities for women's voting rights were remembered by Sylvia Pankhurst, and May Sinclair once even dressed up as a rebel Jane Austen during a suffrage fundraising event.

May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories is a collection of short stories filled with macabre, romantic, and Gothic themes. Enjoy tales of love and loss, murder, philosophy, and supernatural happenings. Summary by RhiannonD.