Robert Suggs (July 8, 1999)The following is a short biography of May Sinclair, whom we've discussed previously. I've read perhaps four of her "Uncanny Tales," and found each one utterly unforgettable. The most recent I've discovered is called La Villa Desiree, and it's online--but since I copied the text I can't get the link to work. So on consecutive following e-mails I'm going to simply place the text in posts to this newsgroup. If you don't want to read it, don't read it. But there will be some discussion, I promise you, of this highly charged sexual ghost story. Sinclair had an amazing knack for dealing with the sexual in a supenatural tale and using the two elements (love and death, basically) for weird effect on each other. The story is also in a few books, most recently Slung's I Shudder at Your Touch. The following is from a U Penn site devoted to her Harriett Frean novel:
May Sinclair was born in Liverpool, England, in 1863; she was the youngest of six children and the only daughter. Due to her father's difficulties with business ventures and alcohol, her parents were separated. All of her brothers inherited heart disease that took the life of four of them before the age of fifty, and May Sinclair nursed most of them during their infirmity to their death. She had no formal education until she was eighteen, when she studied with Dorothea Beale at Cheltenham Ladies College. It was under Ms. Beale's influence that May Sinclair began her lifelong study and interest in philosophy, psychology, and Greek literature; she also began to write: poetry, initially, then fiction. Her first published novel was Audrey Craven in 1897. From 1908 May Sinclair was active in the campaign to secure the vote for women. She worked with writers such as Violet Hunt and Cicely Hamilton for the Suffragist cause.
Critically acclaimed in both Britain and America as one of the great writers of the Georgian Age, she was the friend and contemporary of Wells, James, Hardy, Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford, and of Dorothy Richardson, about whose work she first coined the famous phrase 'stream of consciousness'. She was one of the earliest English novelists to be influenced by the work of Freud and Jung, and was influenced too by her friendships with the Imagists Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle.
--from the 1986 edition of Life and Death of Harriett Frean by Penguins Books-- Virago PressMay Sinclair wrote a total of twenty-four novels, as well as a variety of poetry, criticism, philosophical works, and short stories. For the last fifteen years of her life, however, she suffered from Parkinson's disease. In 1932 she retired from London to Buckinghamshire, where she died in 1946.
After the First World War, before the emergence of Virginia Woolf as a major writer, May Sinclair was considered the most distinguished woman novelist in England. She was widely read and at the same time emjoyed the respect of 'serious' writers like Pound, Forster and T. S. Eliot. A reading of Harriett Frean suggests reasons for both the respect and the popularity.
Her work was frequently compared with that of Charlotte Bronte, May Sinclair's own favorite novelist, whose influence can be seen most clearly in the novel she set in Yorkshsire entitled Three Sisters. Yet the heroine of Harriet Frean recalls another passionate, embattled nineteenth-century character, not Jane Eyre, but Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. The novel can be read as a delayed response to Maggie's question which has echoed down the corridors of women's writing:Is it not right to resign ourselves entirely, whatever . . . may be denied us? I have found great peace in that for the last two or three years--even joy in subduing my own will.
The answer May Sinclair provides in Life and Death of Harriett Frean is an emphatic 'No'. That whatever the peace--'even joy'--that may be achieved through self-denial and the subjugation of the individual will, it is 'not right' for women to resign or subdue themselves.
--Jean Radford in the Introduction to Life and Death of Harriett Frean
(New York: Penguin Books, 1986)oOo
Dranaan (July 9, 1999)
Are we going to discuss the story or do people sometimes post tales just for the sake of having them? I'm still new, so I am not sure wht the procedure is.Thanks,
Dranaan
"Ghost stories, no matter how dreadful, are ultimately optimistic: they promise Shape beyond Self."
Stanley KubrickoOo
paghat (July 9, 1999)
May Sinclair was a lesbian bluestocking & her story reflects her actual attitudes about men -- note that in the Villa tale it is a GOOD man whose id is a rapist. It is interesting to contrast "Villa..." to Vernon Lee's "The Doll" wherein another lesbian bluestocking writes of her fear of women. The headnotes in my anthology WHAT DID MISS DARRINGTON SEE? include discussions of these & related stories.-paghat
oOo
Robert Suggs (July 10, 1999)
This is interesting. I definitely agree the fear of men comes across, and it's dealt with beautifully on artistic terms--it works on a purely supernatural and narrative level and not simply a Freudian one. I'm not sure, at least from my reading, that the husband-to-be is thought by Sinclair to be a GOOD man. His comments about "anticipation" are even a little sugary-creepy in their own context, but of course after the denouement we know (more than we want) what he means by "anticipation." Of course on strict Freudian terms (much as I hate playing on that turf in a literary context; but Sinclair had a strong interest in those matters) he could still be a good man and his id of course be an entirely different side of him. In a more general sense this guy is a pedophile who can't wait to get his hands on another hot little number. His lust has actually taken apparitional form. And the leering face is there, the torso, and what's below just WAITING to be made whole. Hmmmm. And the heroine herself should not be overlooked. Beyond the obvious theme of fear of coupling, what kind of girl of her kind is drawn to a character with this guy's background, BECAUSE of that background--as she says she is? All that ultimately matters is that this is a highly original melding of sex and spirit that always sets May Sinclair's stories apart. Still, this is enough for me for awhile. Let's NOT discuss E. F. Benson's "And No Bird Sings" (if I got the title right).
To answer your question, Dranaan, there's no formal procedure here, and we don't normally put stories right here in the newsgroup (I just couldn't get the Web link to work). But we suggest stories to discuss occasionally as we come to them. Hey, rbadac, you gonna weigh in on this one, Mr. Squeamish?
RoboOo
rbadac (July 10, 1999)
> Hey, rbadac, you gonna weigh in on this one, Mr.
> Squeamish?
> RobYou'll eat those words, Style Boy. I already wrote my essay, and here it is.
If you took the sex out of May Sinclair's ghost stories, what would be left? Well, quite a lot, actually; a supple technique capable of being stalwart or experimental as the situation demands; a lambent, clear-eyed style that inspires a peculiar confidence in the reader and allows oneself to be lead to remarkable and trenchant conclusions; and a character psychology so perceptive that it is equally at home with naivete and paranoia in the human makeup, can justify either as elements of a larger personality, and make the whole entirely believable.
Anyway, back to the sex. They'd still be excellent stories of course, but they just wouldn't be the same. And this particular period of literature would lose a very appealing maverick who also happens to be on a level with its giants.
May Sinclair wrote more novels than short stories it appears, in a prolific period that ended in 1930 when her neuromuscular degeneration reached the point at which writing was impossible. Her exploration of psychological and metaphysical themes is groundbreaking, and her treatment of human eroticism so unexpectedly frank and revealing that the quality still resonates even in our modern taboo-less age.
I wish I knew enough French to determine if the title of the story translates as 'House of Desire' or as 'House of the Desirer' or as 'House of the Desired.' They all work, but 'Desirer' would be the most telling. The conception of the ghost here is straight from the murky recesses of the Id. There is a bizarre correctness in the easy recognition of the face, while the form swirls in flux. Torn as it is in the morass of its abominations constantly struggling to be born (one is reminded of the degenerative metamorphoses of the dying Helen Vaughn in Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan'), its identity is never in doubt.
It is also blind, 'parted from all controlling and absolving clarity.' The keynote is Desire in its most primal, irrupted form. Desire wants what it does not have, or it would not be; wants what it does not understand, perceiving only that aspect of the desired which satisfies it; and wants what it does not love, for Desire is selfish. It is the common denominator of all seven of the Deadly Sins, Anger, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Avarice, and Pride all defined by their Desire for something at the expense of everything else.
And when Desire is satisfied it becomes a Phantom, a baleful, incorporate yet compulsive thought disassociated from its carnal exegesis until such time as it might reassert itself in flesh to feed its neverending hunger. It is the vampire of the Spirit, in direct contrast to the Buddhist doctrines Sinclair examined in later stories espousing the goal to be free of desire in order to attain perfection.
Mildred speaks to her friend Martha of her attraction to Louis Carson, which Martha can't fathom ('Is he *very* beautiful?' 'Yes. But it isn't *that,* Martha. I can't tell you what it is.') because she knows it is misplaced, though her own equally misplaced reserve prevents her from acknowledging the reasons until later. It is indeed a bootless attraction, only a reflection of the all-consuming Desire that Mildred sees in Louis. Horrible to think that, as Louis could not wait the fortnight to see his betrothed but came to the hotel early, his shadow ran as fast, and overtook him.
rbadac
oOo
William Allison (July 11, 1999)
rbadac wrote:
>You'll eat those words, Style Boy. I already wrote my essay, and here it is.
>
>If you took the sex out of May Sinclair's ghost stories, what would be left?
>Well, quite a lot, actually; a supple technique capable of being stalwart or
>experimental as the situation demands; a lambent, clear-eyed style that
>inspires a peculiar confidence in the reader and allows oneself to be lead to
>remarkable and trenchant conclusions; and a character psychology so
>perceptive that it is equally at home with naivete and paranoia in the human
>makeup, can justify either as elements of a larger personality, and make the
>whole entirely believable.-snip-
I'm in tears...
Bill A. (who can only dream of writing like that...)
--
alt.books.ghost-fiction FAQ
http://home.epix.net/~wallison/abgf_faq.htmloOo
William Allison (July 11, 1999)
>May Sinclair was a lesbian bluestocking & her story reflects her actual
>attitudes about men -- note that in the Villa tale it is a GOOD man whose
>id is a rapist. It is interesting to contrast "Villa..." to Vernon Lee's
>"The Doll" wherein another lesbian bluestocking writes of her fear of
>women. The headnotes in my anthology WHAT DID MISS DARRINGTON SEE? include
>discussions of these & related stories.
>
>-paghatRegarding WHAT DID MISS DARRINGTON SEE?, L.W. Currey says:
Anthology of twenty-four tales of the supernatural by woman writers published from the 1850s to the 1980s by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Lisa Tuttle, Alice Brown, Anne Sexton, Vernon Lee, Mary Austin, Joanna Russ, and others. A strong collection bringing together many excellent but obscure stories. Includes a 21-page introduction by Rosemary Jackson with preface, story notes and recommended reading list by Salmonson.
I mention this as I notice there are several used copies available on Bookfinder in the $6-10 range, making it quite a bargain and nice addition to any ghostly library.Bill A.
oOo
paghat (July 11, 1999)
The hardcover (issued w/o dw) had only enough copies bound to service library standing orders -- there was no trade h.c. otherwise -- so it's quite rare & if you can get one for $35 it's a bargain. I have only a few copies of the 1st edition paperback as-new & signed for the in-print price, but a used copy through Bibliofind would indeed be cheaper.oOo
rbadac (July 11, 1999)
> I mention this as I notice there are several used copies available on
> Bookfinder in the $6-10 range, making it quite a bargain and nice addition
> to any ghostly library.
>
> Bill A.
Yes. Get it immediately. It's one of the best things Jessica has done, a must-have.
'The Doll' is quite creepy. I read it last night, and was very impressed.
rbadac
oOo
Dranaan (July 13, 1999)
> (snip very well-written ideas for the discussion)OK, I am a little intimidated by the thoughts of the others members of the NG, but I guess, since I am here, I might as well jump in with both feet. Here goes.
I found the story to be an interesting take on sexuality as something monstrous, yet still connected to us as humans. In the case of Ms. Sinclair, I was even more inerested because the two most well-known supernatural examples of this theory, Dracula and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, were written by men several decades before the publication of Ms. Sinclair's personal take on the subject. Since I have not read any of her other work, is this a common theme in her stories?
Dranaan
oOo
Robert Suggs (July 13, 1999)
>Since I have not read any of
>her other work, is this (sexuality as monstrous) a common theme in her stories?
>
>DranaanThe immediate reply would be yes. And yet in the other three or four stories of hers that I've read, sexuality is extremely present but actually not always monstrous. "The Nature of the Evidence" (I think you can find that one at the Gaslight site, and I'll try to dig up the link) is a story of the ghost of a wife standing between her husband and her successor consummating things. It's really fairly humorous, not really in any sense monstrous. "The Token" is I think a more predictable feminist ghost fable. Then there's the very entertaining "The Victim," simply a great ghost story in which, at best, sexuality lurks in the background. All of these are first rate stories. I think La Ville Desiree is certainly the most emotionally honest examination of the author's sexual side.
Link for Gaslight discussion site is:
http://www.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/ However, their link for the Sinclair story seems to be inoperational. Drat.oOo
Randy Money (July 26, 1999)
Always late to the party, I read this, rbadac, and noted your allusion to Machen's "The Great God Pan". It immediately struck me that Sinclair's description of Carson comes across as rather Pan-ish:The intensely blue eyes under the straight black bars of the eyebrows, the perfect pure white face suddenly masked by the black mustache and small black pointed beard. And the rich vivid smile he had for her, the lighting up of the blue, the flash of white teeth in the black mask."
Okay, maybe not the blue eyes, but the rest seems like the stereotype of Pan.
Randy
oOo
rbadac (July 26, 1999)
Well, Pan in England, maybe, it would follow ! With the toes of his shoes filled with newspaper?rbadac, wondering if Pan would kick Freddie and Jason's ass forward or backward
oOo
Randy Money (July 27, 1999)
> rbadac, wondering if Pan would kick Freddie and Jason's ass forward or
> backwardBoth. (And if he had his shoes on, would it be 3 pts for a ringer and 1 for getting close?)
Randy
ooOoo