Sinclair

It’s not the first time I’ve said it, but there is always such a sense of achievement in reading a book that has been on the shelves for a long time. Particularly if it turns out to be a good’un. I bought Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) back in 2009 and it has been patiently waiting for me ever since.

Anne Severn had come again to the Fieldings. This time it was because her mother was dead.

She hadn’t been in the house five minutes before she asked “Where’s Jerrold?”

“Fancy,” they said, “her remembering.”

And Jerrold had put his head in at the door and gone out again when he saw her there in her black frock; and somehow she had known he was afraid to come in because her mother was dead.

Anne is ten years old, and has been a regular visitor to the Fielding family. She has a cautious, fragile connection to the three brothers – who are different from one another, but not in the ‘ticking boxes of different types’ that often happens in novels about young siblings. Jerrold is kind, wise, and almost parental; Eliot is sporty and intelligent and confident; Colin is the youngest and quite anxious. As for their parents – Mr Fielding is a bit distant and very well-meaning, and Mrs Fielding is the opposite of these things. She needs Anne to need her. She is overly attached, and uses emotions as weapons.

As the novel progresses, Anne spends most of her time as part of this family that isn’t related to her, but has sort of adopted her. It’s worth noting that the novel was published a few years before adoption was legally formalised in the UK, and the opening is set a decade or two earlier still. She grows older and Sinclair develops a convincing heroine – loving, uncertain of herself, a combination of spontaneity and regret. Her moral decisions are very interesting for the period. Early in the novel, she says she would do anything for somebody she loved. This prophecy comes true before the end of the novel. The relationships she has with the three brothers in turn, and that with their mother, are all drawn interestingly and convincingly. Sinclair shows us the different facets of one individual that come out in three different friendships, which are indeed quite different, despite all being under the same roof.

Anne Severn and the Fieldings reminded me a lot of The Tree of Heaven – in the sense of showing the important events of the early twentieth century through the lens of one family unit. While they naturally consider themselves of utmost importance, we also get a good sweep of the period – particularly the war.

I found the whole novel involving and psychologically interesting, but it’s the war sections that are the jewel in the crown. Anne goes to the front, working as a nurse. Colin goes too, despite everyone saying that he is too ‘highly-strung’ for it – and, indeed, he suffers appalling shell-shock – or PTSD as we would call it now. Sinclair avoids tropes of ‘our brave troops’ – and, if the actual fighting is a little sanitised, the psychological impact of trauma is dealt with clear-sightedly.

I think Anne Severn and the Fieldings might be better than The Tree of Heaven, though perhaps too similar for me to nominate for the British Library Women Writers series, at least just yet. It’s a novel to luxuriate in, nothing moving quickly but everything capturing the attention. The only thing that prevents it becoming an all-time favourite for me is Sinclair’s tendency towards melodrama, which rather spoils the effect at times. The dialogue, in heightened moments, feels a bit like a b-movie. It’s unsurprising for the era, perhaps, but it’s at odds with the nuanced understanding of human relationships that Sinclair is rightly known for.

Sinclair is in danger of being remembered for coining ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary technique, one or two novels, and not much else – but if her prolific output holds other books as enjoyable and rewarding as Anne Severn and the Fieldings, then it’s time to get digging.

The first lot of British Library Women Writers reprints are out! And in this uncertain and scary world, I think this series is more vital than ever, in these difficult times – bookshops are probably closed now, but the British Library are still delivering from their shop and lots of local indies are still doing postal delivery.

If you missed my announcement a while ago – this Women Writers series is reprinting novels by and about women from the first half of the 20th century, and I’m lucky enough to be series consultant! I’m also writing the afterword for each one, picking out a particular contemporary issue in the novel. For The Tree of Heaven, I wrote about suffragettes. I’m a bit nervous about my afterwords being out in the world, and hoping that people enjoy them – though of course the main thing is the novel itself.

I didn’t choose these first couple of novels, The Tree of Heaven and My Husband Simon – though they’re great – but I did choose the next batch. More on those soon! As they become available, I’m going to be putting up reviews.

The Tree of Heaven was published in 1917, and it’s always interesting to read a novel published during a World War, because obviously the author doesn’t know how or when it will end. It certainly has an effect on all the members of the family at the centre of the novel: there are four Harrison children, Dorothea/Dorothy, Michael, Nicholas/Nicky, and John. Sinclair is clever in the way that uses each of them to embody something major going on at the time, without making them seem too much like stock characters or simply there to represent a theme. Michael, for instance, is in the aesthetic set – all poetry magazines and being anti-patriotism – while Dorothea gets swept up in the suffrage movement.

They grow realistically from children to adults over the course of the novel, and there is a middle section called ‘the vortex’ where each of them finds that their particular interest or allegiance might lead them into a ‘vortex’ that removes their individuality:

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex […] She was afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of her soul.

There’s a lot going on with signing up – or not signing up – to fight, and there’s a subplot about the disputed parentage of another character. There’s a lot going on and, being the 1910s, there is a slightly heightened emotionality to everything – but Sinclair weaves all the strands together really well. I think she’s better at women than men, or at least I found more to engage me in Dorothea’s uncertainty about whether the means justifies the ends in militant suffragism than I did in the different boys’ decisions about whether or not to fight. Not that that isn’t an important discussion, but it felt like Sinclair was a little less invested in it herself, and it’s high and low points lean a little closer to emotional cliche.

But it’s a really engaging, enjoyable, and moving novel. If you’ve only read Life and Death of Harriett Frean then there is a great deal more to love about Sinclair – and this one isn’t as melancholy, though it certainly isn’t a chuckle-fest!

I promise my afterword was more thoroughly researched and diligently edited than this outpouring of thoughts late on a Sunday night ;) – something to compare and contrast if you do get a copy! I’ll be back with more on the other books in the series soon – and revealing which books will be published in the series in the autumn [though if you’re impatient, they’re all in the British Library catalogue and listed on Amazon already].