May Sinclair scholarship: past, present, and future.

Leslie de Bont is a professeure agrégée and teaches English for Psychology at the University of Nantes, France. She is also a PhD candidate from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and her dissertation concentrates on the dialogues between Sinclair’s novels and her theoretical writings. Leslie has given talks and published articles about Sinclair in French and English: e.g. “From the Priest to the Therapist: The Art of Secrecy in Ford’s A Call and May Sinclair’s Anne Severn” in The Edwardian Ford Madox Ford (Rodopi, 2013), “’I was the only one in the family who wasn’t quite sane’: être femme, épouse, mère et artiste dans The Creators de May Sinclair” (congrès SFEVE, 2013) and “Ford, Sinclair and War Heroism” in War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End and Psychology (Edinburgh UP 2014).

Rebecca Bowler is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University. Previous to that she was Research Associate on the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project. She gained her PhD, on Dorothy Richardson’s visual modernisms, from the University of Sheffield in 2012 and has published on Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield and May Sinclair. Her monograph, Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., and May Sinclair, which is published by Bloomsbury looks at Sinclair’s engagement with the modernist struggle to represent perception (Reality) without mediation or translation and her turn to memory as an aesthetic strategy.

Jane Dowson is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has published extensively on women’s poetry, most recently The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (2011) and ‘Poetry 1920-45’, in The Palgrave History of British Women’s Writing, Vol. 8. ed. Mary Joannou, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 161-81. She has written about  May Sinclair, often in conjunction with Charlotte Mew, in: Women, Modernism and British Poetry 1910-39: Resisting Femininity, Ashgate, 2002;  A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry, co-authored with Alice Entwistle, Cambridge University Press, 2005; and ‘The Dark Night: “the novel into some other form”’, in  May Sinclair: Moving towards the Modern, ed. Andrew J. Kunka and Michele K. Troy, Ashgate, 2006, pp. 139-60.

Claire Drewery is a Senior Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University with a long-standing research interest in the work of May Sinclair. Her book Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf was published in 2011. She is currently working on a monograph which explores the interrelationships between Modernism, visual images and popular culture in early twentieth-century women’s writing. Other recent projects include a study of gender, sexuality and performativity in the work of Katherine Mansfield and Oscar Wilde and an article on contemporary philosophical discourses in the work of Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson.

Laurel Forster is currently Senior Lecturer at University of Portsmouth, She completed her PhD in 2000 on May Sinclair, ‘The Life of the Mind’ and has published on May Sinclair’s varied oeuvre since then.  Other research interests extend to women’s cultures and feminist issues and Forster has co-edited two collections, one The Recipe Reader on the cultural significance of the recipe and the other, British Cuture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade. She has just completed a monograph on women’s magazines and their cultural significance: Magazine Movements, and is about to start work on another long study of women writers and their publications in periodicals, this will include a section on May Sinclair.

Jana Funke is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and sexual science and is currently working on a monograph entitled Temporal Mobility: Modernism, Sexuality and Female Development. The book explores the prevalence of various forms of time travel in literary and (pseudo-)scientific narratives of female sexual development in the modernist period. One chapter offers a sustained discussion of Sinclair’s engagement with sexological, psychoanalytic, theosophist and spiritualist debates about time travel and female sexuality, focusing in particular on her short fiction.

George M. Johnson first encountered Sinclair’s works in the late 1980s while researching Edwardian psychological novelists for his dissertation. His book, Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction (Palgrave 2006), includes a chapter on Sinclair, and he has published several articles on her. His forthcoming book, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature: Grappling With Ghosts (Palgrave 2015) deals with the psychological roots of Sinclair’s mysticism. He is a playwright, and Professor and Chair of the English and Modern Languages Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia.

Charlotte Jones graduated from University College London in 2012 with a Congratulatory First, and after undertaking a Masters at Kings College London is now a PhD student at UCL, writing on realist novels of the Edwardian period. Charlotte has published an essay on Ford Madox Ford and the First World War for War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End and Psychology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and has presented papers on Sinclair at the Ezra Pound International Conference and Alternative Modernisms (both 2013), and writes frequently for the Guardian.

Andrew J. Kunka, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter, received his Ph.D. in Twentieth Century British Literature from Purdue University in 2001. His dissertation, ‘The Inward Scream’: Shell-Shock Narratives in Twentieth-Century British Culture, examines the role of shell shock in British narratives of the First World War, including works by Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Helen Zenna Smith, and others. He is co-editor of the essay collection May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern with Dr. Michele K. Troy (Ashgate Press, 2006), to which he contributed the essay “‘He Isn’t Quite an Ordinary Coward’: Gender, Cowardice, and Shell Shock in The Romantic and Anne Severn and the Fieldings.” His essay “The Evolution of Mourning in Siegfried Sassoon’s War Writing” appears in the collection Modernism and Mourning from Bucknell University Press (2007). In addition, he has published work on Ford Madox Ford, the graphic novels of Kyle Baker and Gene Luen Yang, and war movies.

Emma Liggins is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published articles on the New Woman, sensation fiction and fin-de-siecle women’s magazines in Literature & History, Women’s Writing, Victorian Periodicals Review and Journal of Victorian culture. Her previous books are George Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Ashgate, 2006) and (with Andrew Maunder & Ruth Robbins) The British Short Story (Palgrave, 2011). Her forthcoming monograph is Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850s to 1930s (Manchester University Press, 2014), and she has a chapter on the working woman and the family in Charlotte Bronte and May Sinclair in the forthcoming The Afterlives of Charlotte Bronte ed. Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne. Her research interests include the New Woman, fin-de-siecle fiction, Victorian and modernist women’s ghost stories, modernist women’s fiction, and autobiography.

Paul March-Russell teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His research interests include modernism, science fiction, the short story and modern poetry. He edited May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories (Wordsworth, 2006), and has written on ‘The Intercessor’ (‘Pagan Papers: History, Mysticism and Edwardian Childhood’, in Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries, ed. Childhood in Edwardian Fiction, Palgrave 2009) and ‘The Finding of the Absolute’ in Modernism and Science Fiction (Palgrave, forthcoming). He has also published on Sinclair’s contemporaries including Joseph Conrad, George Egerton, E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy.

Philippa Martindale is an Independent Researcher. She received her doctorate on May Sinclair from Durham University in 2003 and has two publications on Sinclair (‘”Against All Hushing Up and Stamping Down”: The Medico-Psychological Clinic of London and the Novelist May Sinclair’, Psychoanalysis and History, 6.2 (July 2004): 177-200; and ‘The “Genius of Enfranchised Womanhood”: Suffrage and The Three Brontës’. In: May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern, eds. Andrew Kunka & Michele Troy. Ashgate, 2006. 179-196). She has been working on a collection of Sinclair’s letters for publication with the help of British Academy funding. This mammoth project has had a slight hiatus due to the realities of life getting in the way, but hopefully will be completed in the near future. If you know of any letters hidden away in an unusual holding, she’d love to hear about them!

Suzanne Raitt is Professor of English at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia (USA). Her biography of May Sinclair, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. After a long break, she is planning to write about Sinclair again in the final chapter of her book Waste and Efficiency in British Culture, 1864-1922, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her article about the Medico-Psychological Clinic with which May Sinclair was affiliated appeared in History Workshop Journal, Issue 58, 2004, and other articles on May Sinclair include ‘Literary history as exorcism: May Sinclair meets the Brontës’, in Women and Literary History: “For There She Was”, ed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 187-200; ‘May Sinclair and the First World War’, in Ideas from the National Humanities Center, Vol 6, No 2 (Fall 1999), 28-47; ‘”A contagious ecstasy”: May Sinclair’s war journals’, in Women’s Fiction and the Great War, ed. Trudi Tate and Suzanne Raitt (Oxford University Press, 1999), 65-84; and ‘Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair. A Love-Song’, Critical Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1995), 3-17; reprinted in Poetry Criticism, 107 (New York: Gale, 2010).

Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. She is author of more than 100 published essays on subjects ranging from Victorian art and print culture, to neo-Victorian literature and film, to women and war, to fashion. Her books include monographs (British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990, 2001), exhibition catalogues (Gender and the London Theatre, 1880–1920, 2004; Facing the Late Victorians, 2007), co-edited essay collections (Michael Field and Their World, 2007; Legacies of the Comfort Women of WWII, 2001), etc. She has curated/co-curated numerous exhibitions, and she is on the editorial boards of three monograph series and four scholarly journals. Her forthcoming publications include essays on Rebecca West (in the journal The Space Between), on Oscar Wilde and the New Woman (in the Cambridge UP volume Oscar Wilde in Context), and on late-Victorian and neo-Victorian masculinities (in the journal Victoriographies).

Luke Thurston is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at Aberystwyth University, and director of the David Jones Centre. He has a number of publications on May Sinclair: a chapter in Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: the Haunting Interval (Routledge 2012); an article “Clouds and Power: May Sinclair’s War”, Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press, 2014); and a chapter in a new monograph Modernism in Time of War (forthcoming).

Diana Wallace is Professor of English Literature at the University of South Wales.  Her PhD, later  published as Sisters and Rivals in British Women’s Fiction, 1914-39 (Palgrave, 2000), included a chapter on May Sinclair which examined representations of relationships between women in The Three Sisters (1914) and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). She contributed an essay entitled ‘‘“A Sort of Genius”: May Sinclair and The Divine Fire’ to May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern ed. Andrew J. Kunka and   Michele K. Troy (Ashgate Press, 2006). She has also written on The Divine Fire in ‘Ventriloquising the Male: two portraits of the artist as a young man by May Sinclair and Edith Wharton’, Men and Masculinities, 4:4 (2002), pp. 322-333, and on Sinclair’s ‘The Villa Désirée’ (1926) in ‘Uncanny Stories: the ghost story as female gothic’, Gothic Studies, 6:1 (2004), pp. 57-68.

Leigh Wilson is Principal Lecture in English Literature at the University of Westminster. She did her PhD on May Sinclair (2000) and now works on the connections between modernism and the occult, which still regularly brings her back to Sinclair. She has published ‘She in Her “Armour” and He in his Coat of Nerves’: May Sinclair and the rewriting of Chivalry’, in Ann Heilmann (ed.), Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century, London: Pandora, 2003. Her latest work is Modernism and Magic: Experiments With Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (EUP, 2013).

If you are working (or have worked) on May Sinclair, and would like to be included on this page then please get in touch – maysinclairsociety@sheffield.ac.uk