Mary Olivier, a Life

By May Sinclair

Book Overview

First published in 1919, Mary Olivier is one of May Sinclair's best-remembered novels. The youngest of four children and the only girl in her Victorian family, Mary Olivier faces formidable barriers: she will not be educated as her brothers, nor will she be afforded their freedoms. Held emotionally hostage to a calculating mother, Mary retreats into her imagination and into books. Rejecting Victorian formulas, she becomes a published poet and refuses to marry a succession of suitors. Yet she remains a dutiful daughter. Hers is a timeless story in which obligation and liberty, acquiescence and rebellion coexist in a fully realized, ultimately modern woman.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385276532
• ISBN13: 9780385276535
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Edwardian Theatre

May Sinclairs novel is a subtle and quite devastating disection of a females life in the Victorian era. Stifled by a rigid sense of what it is important for a girl to aspire to, the sensitve and independent character of Mary Olivier strives to find her own answers to lifes mysteries. She cannot ask anyone about literature, Arts or the more (for her) burning philosophical questions of meaning and substance. When she does she is early on taken to task by the very men she assumed would assist her. This is the key to the subtlety of the dialogue between Mary and her male friends.Considerable time is also taken up with Mary's relationship with her family members. This a satisfying book and the reader will be richly rewarded in following the life of Mary Olivier.

A superb (if flawed) modernist Bildungsroman

MARY OLIVIER: A LIFE came out serialized in the same issues of THE LITTLE REVIEW as James Joyce's ULYSSES, and has never received its proper due for its achievement. part of this may also stem that it was written ten to fifteen years after the great spate of Edwardian parricidal Bildungsromans, which include Joyce's PORTRAIT, Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS, Maugham's OF HUMAN BONDAGE, Bennett's CLAYHANGER and Butler's THE WAY OF ALL FLESH. Yet MARY OLIVIER deserves at the very least to be in such fine company. May Sinclair herself coined the term "stream-of-consciousness" to describe the technique of Dorothy Richardson, and she uses this technique herself here in recounting the life of a young woman from the Victorian Sixties to late middle age. The results are astonishing: it may remind you a bit of Joyce's PORTRAIT, and a bit of Katherine Mansfield's Burnell Family stories, but it's also like neither of them. Mary and her brothers must revolt against their father's jealous possessiveness of his wife and their mother's sweet manipulations and doctrinaire piety, but they can never bring themselves to fully hate them. they realize that their parents are also actual people, flawed and yearning to love, and Sinclair outstrips many other writers of Bildungsromans by giving the parents their due. The last third of the book (after the father dies) is a bit tedious, but the novel is a real triumph, especially in its presentation of the way children think about their parents, the world around them, and even philosophical matters.