‘Dying to Live’: Remembering and Forgetting May Sinclair

Abstract

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.

The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair

“…Following its success, the writer Ford Madox Ford (1931: 326) stated, ‘Parties were given at which examinations were held as to the speeches of the characters in Miss Sinclair's book’. Sinclair traveled around America, meeting the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, and going motoring with President Theodore Roosevelt; on this and other anecdotes, see Raitt (2000: 95–96). She became friends with H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy.…”

“…Toward the end of her life Sinclair became ill, and she wrote nothing after 1927. For more on Sinclair's biography, see Boll (1973), Raitt (2000), and Saunders (2007).…”

“…She defended the Women's Suffrage League in a 1912 pamphlet, Feminism . Substantial scholarship exists on Sinclair's fiction; major studies include Boll (1973), Raitt (2000), Kunka and Troy (2011), Bowler (2016), and Bowler and Drewery (2017). Sinclair's feminism is also well studied: see Boll (1973: 251–23), Raitt (2000: 104–13), Forster (2003), Pease (2006), and Gough (2009).…”

“…For example, her first book Nakiketas and other Poems —published in 1886 under the pseudonym Julian Sinclair—has Death saying, Knowledge is Being …Man works, and from the clay of his own hands,Or dreams of his own soul, he shapes the gods. (Sinclair 1886: 12–13)As Raitt (2000: 36) observes, ‘Sinclair's Death is an idealist’. Sinclair's idealism is also explicit in her short story ‘Finding the Absolute’, discussed below.…”

“…She also became a founding member of Dr. Jessie Margaret Murray's Medico-Psychological clinic. On Sinclair's psychological work, see Boll (1973: 256–60) and Raitt (2000: 109–44).…”