ABSTRACT
In 1923 British supernatural fiction was largely dominated by eight figures: E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Lord Dunsany, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Oliver Onions, and Edith Wharton. It would be overstatement to say that May Sinclair belongs in this company, for she was neither a great innovator in form or subject matter within the genre of fantastic fiction, nor was she a prolific writer of the fantastic, her output consisting of only two collections, Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor (1931). At the same time, Sinclair was a highly capable and original writer, one of the best (and arguably the best) of the second rank of fantasists active during the 1920s, and her supernatural writings do not deserve the almost complete critical neglect they have been accorded. The first lengthy study of Sinclair, Theophilus E.M. Boll’s Miss May Sinclair: Novelist, summarizes her fantasies in its penultimate chapter, “Other Writings: 1921-1931” (301-3), but to be fair, the book’s focus is on Sinclair’s longer fiction, not on her poetry or short fiction. Hrisey D. Zegger’s briefer May Sinclair discusses Uncanny Stories not at all and mentions only the title story of The Intercessor, and then largely to present a discussion of Sinclair’s familiarity with and indebtedness to Henry James (62-3). Rebeccah Kinnamon Neff does a brief close reading of Uncanny Stories and draws reasonable conclusions: that “the stories compare favorably with other fictional ventures into the supernormal among both Sinclair’s contemporaries and ours” (187), and that they “expose the flaws in the human personality which interfere with full consciousness and elucidate the conditions under which the ordinary person can achieve transcendence” (190). However, her article does not focus on Sinclair more broadly as a writer of the fantastic, nor does it mention The Intercessor. Even the most recent biography of Sinclair, Suzanne Raitt’s lengthy, sympathetic, and unpatronizing May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, concentrates predominantly on Sinclair’s “realistic” fiction and fails to discuss Sinclair’s fantastic fiction at any length, though-undoubtedly in recognition of the importance of the supernatural in Sinclair’s life-there is an entry in the index for “interest in the supernatural” (306).
