ABSTRACT
The First World War is often used to locate the precise moment of modernist rupture with the past; to many critics the conflict represents, or even initiates, the epistemological break dividing the modernist and Victorian eras. Yet the reality of the war’s literary legacy is much more complex, a complexity encapsulated in the work of May Sinclair, the best-selling and critically respected Edwardian novelist who travelled to the Belgian Front in September 1914. This chapter opens with a discussion of Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915) and its interaction with the literary impressionism of her friend Ford Madox Ford, particularly in its capacity as a useful concept for critics attempting to identify and categorize a transitional phase between Victorian realism and twentieth-century modernism. Yet for a text marked with characteristic impressionist instability and obfuscation, the Journal also contains curious moments of profound and intense clarity, which I trace to Sinclair’s interest in the turn-of-the-century philosophical Idealism of F.H. Bradley. This chapter explores the ways in which Bradley’s Idealism, Ford’s impressionism and Sinclair’s First World War context exert pressure on one another, in order to extrapolate what this reveals about the ongoing importance of the Journal as a link between the Victorianism from which it emanates and the modernism it presages.
