The Three Sisters

Author, poet, critic, and suffragist Mary Amelia St. Clair was a contemporary of and acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West, among others. She served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and produced poetry and fiction based on it.

Her novel Mr. Waddington of Wyk was a social comedy. The Three Sisters is Sinclair's first psychological novel, drawing upon her interest in the work of Sigmund Freud. It an early example of the transition from classic realism to modernism, Influenced by Imagism, and structured around epiphanies, images and symbols. It's also considered a precursor to her later novels Mary Oliver and Harriet Frean, using knowledge of psychoanalysis and acknowledging the importance of the character's internal reality.

May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863 - 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. May Sinclair was also a significant critic in the area of modernist poetry and prose and she is attributed with first using the term stream of consciousness in a literary context, when reviewing the first volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915-67), in The Egoist, April 1918. From 1896 Sinclair wrote professionally to support herself and her mother, who died in 1901. An active feminist, Sinclair treated a number of themes relating to the position of women and marriage. Her works sold well in the United States. Around 1913, at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London, she became interested in psychoanalytic thought and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization (which included Lady Dorothie Feilding, Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm) that aided wounded Belgian soldiers on the Western Front in Flanders. She was sent home after only a few weeks at the front. Her 1913 novel The Combined Maze, the story of a London clerk and the two women he loves, was highly praised by critics, including George Orwell, while Agatha Christie considered it one of the greatest English novels of its time.