May Sinclair

MARY AMELIA ST CLAIR SINCLAIR was born at Rock Ferry in Cheshire in 1863. From a young age, she suffered reverses: her father went bankrupt very early in her life, became an alcoholic, and died; four of her five older brothers were ill, and she was required to look after them; her mother was emotionally distant and strict. Her first book of poetry was published in 1886. She went on to write several more, as well as works of philosophy and criticism, short stories and novels, supporting her family with her work. She became active in the suffrage movement. Her novels increasingly showed the influence of the growing modernist movement as the new twentieth century progressed. She is known for having first used the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to fiction, thereby giving accurate focus to the great experiments in the genre in her time. In the 1920s, she began to show signs of Parkinson’s Disease, and retired from writing and public life in the early 1930s. She died in 1946 at the age of 83.