ABSTRACT
The Divine Fire (1904) is the story of a Cockney poet called Savage Keith Rickman with “the soul of a young Sophocles” who finally attains both literary success and the woman he loves (30). It was also the novel that made May Sinclair’s name. The fame it brought, however, made her a writer less honored in her own country than abroad. While the novel bought moderate critical and popular success in Britain, in America it transformed her into a lionized “bestseller” throughout a country where, according to a rather bewildered Ford Madox Hueffer, “Divine Fire” dinner parties required the guests to dress to the theme and “the Golden West literally flamed with the covers of the ‘Divine Fire’” (2). Reviews hailed it as “a powerful book” (Literary Digest), “a very remarkable piece of writing … with as interesting a hero as any English novelist has given us for years” (Current Literature), and of “genuine literary significance” (Critic) (Taylor 22).1 It was compared to writers from George Gissing (an obvious model for Sinclair’s struggling young writer making his way in “New Grub Street”), to George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Charlotte Brontë.
