ABSTRACT
When May Sinclair writes to her friend Evelyn Sharp in December 1908, we get an early glimpse at a once reluctant suffragist turned active. Sinclair not only comments to Sharp that she has just made a financial contribution “to the fund”1 for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), but also shares with her friend some insight about a suffrage piece she is drafting: “It is … a forecast of the choices for Art and Literature ‘when we get the vote’” (Sinclair, Letter to Evelyn Sharp). In the finished article, titled “How It Strikes a Mere Novelist” and published in Votes for Women, Sinclair optimistically considers the role women will play in the future of art:
The coming generation will, I believe, witness a finer art, a more splendid literature than has been seen since the Elizabethan Age. At the present moment, the moment of transition, it looks as if art and literature were threatened with dreadful forms of weakness, death, and corruption.
