May Sinclair

The Tree of Heaven May Sinclair

The Tree of Heaven draws upon Sinclair's experiences in the First World War. Concerned with the Harrisoon family, it follows the three children, Michael, Nicky, and Dorothy, as they grow up in the 1900s and face the war as young adults. Dorothy hosts a sufragette meeting that lands her in jail, then trains with the Red Cross and joins an ambulance unit in Belgium. Michael is a poet involved with avant-garde artists, embracing pacifism and resisting family pressure to join up. Nicky is an engineer who enlists early and invents an early prototype of the tank. The novel examines the ideals of the suffrage movement, the spiritual uplift of the war, and the personal cost both could extract from those involved. May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair, a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. 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, in The Egoist, April 1918. Sinclair wrote two volumes of supernatural fiction, Uncanny Stories and The Intercessor and Other Stories. Gary Crawford has stated Sinclair's contribution to the supernatural fiction genre, "small as it is, is notable". Jacques Barzun included mer among a list of supernatural fiction writers that "one should make a point of seeking out", and Brian Stableford stated that her "supernatural tales are written with uncommon delicacy and precision, and they are among the most effective examples of their fugitive kind."