ABSTRACT
In a laudatory review of May Sinclair’s novel Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) from 1923, Lewis Mumford concludes his praises with the question, “Saving perhaps Mr. D.H. Lawrence, who in England can keep her company?” (99). This pairing of Sinclair and Lawrence, as surprising as it seems now, was actually common at the time and continued to be so for the next two decades, first in reviews, and then in critical and literary historical surveys of the British novel. In 1924, Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell devoted an entire chapter to Sinclair in their collection of critical essays on modern fiction and yet another to an extended comparison of Mary Olivier (1919) and Sons and Lovers (1913) entitled “Post-Freudian Apron-Strings.” In 1932, in their History of the Novel in England, Robert Lovett and Helen Hughes selected Sinclair and Lawrence (along with E.M. Forster) as the key Georgian writers and compared how they used psychoanalytic theory in their fiction. Elizabeth Drew in The Modern Novel (1926), Walter L. Myers in The Later Realism (1927), Frank Swinnerton in The Georgian Literary Scene (1935), Gordon Gerould in The Patterns of English and American Fiction (1942), and William Frierson in The English Novel in Transition (1942), all link Sinclair and Lawrence for the sexual frankness and psychological focus of their fiction. For over two decades then, the association of these two writers seemed obvious and natural and even extended on occasion to a personal level. For example, in his reminiscences of Lawrence in the memoir Contacts (1935), Curtis Brown remarks that both Lawrence and Sinclair had a “‘burning glass’ kind of mind”—explaining that the intensity of their focus on any subject could cause a “conflagration”—and speculates that this was “a prime quality of genius” (81).
