ABSTRACT
During a formal family luncheon, Mary Olivier, the eponymous protagonist and narrator of May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), reports, “you drank raspberry vinegar out of the silver christening cups the aunts and uncles gave you when you were born” (41). Mary reads the name engraved on her cup, “MARY VICTORIA OLIVIER,” followed by her birth date, 1863. Her full name and birth date are distinctly separate from the rest of the text, and the capital letters stand alone in the center of the page, allowing Sinclair to call her readers’ attention to the significance of Mary’s name and birth date-as permanently and prominently fixed on the page as on the silver christening cup. As Suzanne Raitt argues in her biography of Sinclair, Sinclair encourages a semi-autobiographical reading of the novel by giving Mary her own first name and birth date: “Even though Mary Olivier is a novel, Sinclair drew on vignettes and events from her own history to write the story of a woman who shares her own given name, her religious doubts, many of her intellectual passions (Mary Olivier reads Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel), and the year of her birth” (217).
