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May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 – 14 November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. Bookrags biography She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. She once dressed up as a demure, rebel Jane Austen for a suffrage fundraising event. Sinclair was also a significant critic in the area of modernist poetry and prose, and she is attributed with first using the term 'stream of consciousness' in a literary context, when reviewing the first volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967), in The Egoist, April 1918.
Around 1913, she was a founding supporter of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London which was run by Dr Jessie Murray. Sinclair became interested in psychoanalytic thought, and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization (which included Lady Dorothie Feilding, Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm) that aided wounded Belgian people soldiers on the Western Front in Flanders. She was sent home after only a few weeks at the front; she wrote about the experience in both prose and poetry.
Her 1913 novel The Combined Maze, the story of a London clerk and the two women he loves, was highly praised by critics, including George Orwell, while Agatha Christie considered it one of the greatest English novels of its time.
She wrote early criticism on Imagism and the poet H. D. (1915 in The Egoist); she was on social terms with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound at the time. She also reviewed in a positive light the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1917 in the Little Review) and the fiction of Dorothy Richardson (1918 in The Egoist). Some aspects of Sinclair's subsequent novels have been traced as influenced by modernist techniques, particularly in the autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). She was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers.
Sinclair wrote two volumes of supernatural fiction, Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931). E. F. Bleiler called Sinclair "an underrated writer" and described Uncanny Stories as "excellent".E. F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Kent State University Press, 1983 Gary Crawford has stated Sinclair's contribution to the supernatural fiction genre, "small as it is, is notable". Jacques Barzun included Sinclair among a list of supernatural fiction writers that "one should make a point of seeking out".Jacques Barzun, "Introduction" to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, (p. xxviii). Brian Stableford has stated that Sinclair's "supernatural tales are written with uncommon delicacy and precision, and they are among the most effective examples of their fugitive kind".Brian Stableford, "Sinclair, May" in David Pringle, ed., St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. (Detroit: St. James Press, 1998) (pp. 538-539) Andrew Smith has described Uncanny Stories as "an important contribution to the ghost story".Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature. Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 2007 (p. 130)
American critic Dorothy Parker chastised Sinclair for producing books "with one hand tied behind her and a buttered crumpet in the other.' "Pretty Garotte" by Kasia Boddy, London Review of Books, 11 September 2025, p. 9
From the late 1920s, she was suffering from the early signs of Parkinson's disease, and ceased writing. She settled with a companion in Buckinghamshire in 1932. She died on 14 November 1946.
She is buried at St John-at-Hampstead's churchyard, London.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 43586-43587). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Sinclair was interested in parapsychology and spiritualism, she was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from 1914.Boll, Theophilus Ernest Martin. (1973). Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Associated University Presses, Inc. p. 105.
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