Mary Olivier: A Life was published in 1919 and remains one of the best-known works of May Sinclair. The most striking about the novel is, despite its being more than 100 years old, how modern it feels. It’s like it could have almost been written by Claire Keegan. Almost. May Sinclair writes her story in third person, yet Mary addresses herself frequently in second person, a “you” which, even though refers to Mary herself, transfers its intimacy to the reader, tucked outside the page, as well as to the writer, since the story carries autobiographical elements as well. The modernity of the story comes, I think, from the fact that Mary offers the reader a very limited perspective of her life. The novel reads almost as a third-person diary of someone who, as a child, doesn’t understand everything that’s happening and, as an adult, doesn’t need to go into much detail. And yet the book remains of its time. It traces the story of a woman’s life from the 1860s to the 1910s, from childhood to middle age, and it retains that atmosphere of strict family relations and the necessary submission to family duties, while sacrificing education and personal life.
mary olivier: a life
In 1919 Virginia Woolf publishes her second novel, Night and Day, a novel which her friend and competitor, Katherine Mansfield, despised because, as she saw it, the book didn’t address the problems of its time. Mansfield wasn’t wrong. While Woolf was still struggling to find a way towards the language of modernism, May Sinclair was using in Mary Olivier a narrative technique which places the novel within the early wave of modernist fiction. Before starting work on the novel, the author had written an article on Pilgrim, Dorothy Richardson’s series of novels on the life of Miriam Henderson, highlighting Richardson’s stream-of-consciousness technique. It seems this was an inspiration for Sinclair herself who, through Mary’s inner voice creates a self-reflective, alive consciousness, which anticipates the later experiments of Woolf and Joyce.
By the gate of the field her sudden, secret happiness came to her. She could never tell when it was coming, nor what it would come from. It had something to do with the trees standing up in the golden white light. It had come before with a certain sharp white light flooding the fields, flooding the room.
Mary Olivier: A Life follows its heroine from early childhood in the 1860s to middle age in the 1910s, charting her intellectual and emotional development within a conventional Victorian household. Mary is the youngest child and only daughter, and grows up in a household with her three brothers, Mark, Dank and Roddy, a caring father and a religious and distant mother. Mary is denied the educational opportunities granted to her brothers, and she finds solace in the books of her brothers and philosophy, cultivating an inner life that becomes both refuge and resource. Over the course of the novel she rejects conventional Christianity, engages with a succession of suitors, and eventually becomes a published poet, while remaining a dutiful daughter, bound by family obligations and loyal to what her family and class expect of her.
mary and her mother
She climbed up on a chair and looked out of the window. She could see Mamma’s small beautiful nose bending over the tray of beads, and her bright eyes that slid slantwise to look at her. And under the window she saw the brown twigs of the lilac bush tipped with green. Her happiness was sharp and still like the white light.
Mary’s relationship with her mother is the emotional core of the novel. Even though we need to piece together fragments of Mary’s life as she delivers them to us through a limited, almost claustrophobic, point of view, the intensity of her love for her mother is shining through in every scene. Mary is the dutiful daughter who sacrifices her personal life and decides to care for her mother after her father and two of her brothers die and another one leaves the house. The feelings this raises in me, as a reader, are quite ambivalent. One the one hand, you feel like the mother “doesn’t deserve” Mary’s sacrifice, but who questions what is deserved and what not when a loved one is in such need? Mary was aware that she was not the favourite child, she had endless conflicts and discussions with her mother on opposite sides of religion, but she was still craving for the motherly love which she was never going to be offered.
By the end of the story, Mary becomes a published poet, rejects marriage, and cultivates a rich inner life. Although not all these things happen necessarily out of free will. The relationships with men are all governed by social constrains and approval, or rather disapproval, given by her mother. There is an older suitor who meets Mary as a young girl, and seeks an early marriage. There is a friend of her brother’s who appreciates her intelligence, but this is interpreted by her mother that he’s “scared” of Mary. There is a married man who expresses feelings for Mary, but her morality doesn’t allow her to respond openly. Mary doesn’t necessarily express regret for deciding for an unmarried life, but her feelings for all these men are part of her personality. The novel closes with Mary in her 50s, independent yet marked by sacrifices, willing and unwilling.
mary, aunt charlotte and the madwoman in the attic
Aunt Bella whispered something. And Mamma said “Stuff and nonsense! No more than you or I. Only you never know what queer thing she’ll do next.”
Aunt Bella said, “She was always queer as long as I remember her”
Mamma’s foot went tap, tap again. “She’s been sending away things worse than ever. Dolls. Those naked ones”
Mary and her mother aren’t the only women in this beautiful and strangely claustrophobic novel. Mary has a close relationship to her aunts as well, Aunt Lavvy and Aunt Charlotte, the sisters of her father, only these very “queer” women don’t take up so much page space as I would have liked them to. Aunt Lavvy has “Opinions” (progressive, often controversial views on religion, politics, and women’s roles) which are better left at home, and Aunt Charlotte suffers from a mysterious sickness which, later in Mary’s life, forces her to move close to her brother’s home and be in his care.
The two aunts offer alternative models of womanhood. Aunt Lavvy is an intellectual and a rebel whom the patriarchal family tries to contain and marginalize, while Aunt Charlotte is eccentric and emotionally volatile. Both women tell different stories of what happens to women who can’t or won’t fit the mold, but they also clearly show that’s it’s very possible to live by one’s own rhythm. The two characters made me think of other novels which tell stories of women who don’t fit the mold, and how differently they can be treated. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner is a funny novel about an unmarried aunt who decides to live on her own in the countryside. Closer related to Aunt Charlotte is Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The concept has taken a life of its own and is also understood as a metaphor for the woman writer and the unconventional woman whose creativity and desire are pathologized. Aunt Charlotte is not locked in the attic, but is confined within the family’s view of what is respectable and can be made public, with her life story serving as a shadow for Mary’s own struggle between duty and selfhood.
Read more than a century after its publication, Mary Olivier: A Life feels less like a relic of the past and more like a modern novel which speaks our language about one or two things which could serve even a woman of our time. Sinclair’s novel anticipates the modernist experiments of Virginia Woolf and speaks both of mundane things (the relationship between mother and daughter) as well as of hidden secrets and who pays their costs. The novel offers an open ending, as Mary survives the stifling relationship to her mother and finds comfort in her writing and independent living, and unresolved tensions between a free woman and a madwoman in the attic. I wish more of us would find this little gem, for Mary’s story is the story of anyone who struggles to find a path of their own.
your thoughts?