Sentiment

“In what a midnight his soul seems to walk! and what maladies he draws from the moon!”

Vincent O’Sullivan looks inside the lives of a group of middle-class English people just before the start of the first world war. The story centres around the love affairs of four young people and how they interact.

O’Sullivan picks apart his characters’ cares and concerns and shows how these are trivial when we know what was about to happen to them and their world.

“In Sentiment, Vincent O’Sullivan performs the neatest job of skinning his characters alive that I ever saw. He has written a book too delicate in its surgery to be called satire, about some people—who as it were—fall in love. There are all sorts of opportunities to stab them, but his knife cuts lightly and swiftly and gently, just under the surface hardly hurting them!” The Liberator, March 1918

Vincent O’Sullivan (1868-1940) was born into a prosperous Irish American family in New York and moved to London as a child. However, Vincent spent much of his life in the demi-monde world that is the setting of many of his stories.

While living in Paris, O’Sullivan was friends with Oscar Wilde, Leonard Smithers, Aubrey Beardsley and other members of the Aesthetic movement.

The writer Robert Aickman wrote of O’Sullivan that: “Having lived a longish life as a more or less well-to-do rentier, in latish middle age found himself ruined, wrote his last book under terrible conditions, and, dying in Paris, ended anonymously in the common pit for the cadavers of paupers.”

Vincent O'Sullivan is Professor of English Emeritus at Victoria University of Wellington as well as a novelist, poet, and biographer. He is the editor of "The Oxford Book of New Zealand Poetry", "The Oxford Book of New Zealand Stories", "The Selected Letters of Katherine Mansfield", and, with Margaret Scott, the five-volume edition of "The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield".