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This chapter discusses the complex representations of war heroism in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End and in May Sinclair’s four war novels: Tasker Jevons: The Real Story (1916), The Tree of Heaven (1917), The Romantic (1920), and Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922). It argues that Ford and Sinclair, albeit differently, helped forge a new type of literary war heroism through their specific use of Freudian psychoanalysis. With Ford and Sinclair, heroism is transferred from the expected war records to the many intellectual and psychological battles fought by the soldiers’ minds. The antecedents, thoughts, feelings, impressions, and unconscious mind of the soldiers are the main focus of Ford and Sinclair’s construction of war heroism. This chapter argues that the experience of fragmentation, the struggle for continuity through culture, and the impossibility of a return to civilian life are three of the key dynamics in Ford and Sinclair’s portrayal of their modernist heroes.

This chapter discusses women writers in the early years of the 20th century, who had to learn the classical languages quickly in order to prove that they could compete with men in university examinations. Their responses to the classics are mediated by English literature, particularly novels by women. May Sinclair revises the plot of the Victorian girl who is prevented from studying by familial pressures. Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain studied Latin and Greek at Oxford for preliminary examinations; both comment on men's use of classical images to express scorn for women at Oxford. Sayers and Brittain draw on the epics of Homer and Virgil, and Aristotle's Poetics, to claim literary status for the popular forms in which they were writing, the detective story and the First World War memoir.

This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.

Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relationship between realist aesthetics and figurative language as it might be oriented towards an unimaginable term—an unknowable, noumenal category—by considering its collision with what May Sinclair posits as its psychological equivalent, the unconscious. Sinclair combined a career as a novelist with philosophical research, mounting a vindication of neo-Hegelian idealist philosophy. For Sinclair, idealism’s impetus for thinking about immaterial and unseen realities led to the intangible and unseen realms of the mind, and a metaphysical absolute becomes the conduit for her early realist novels to begin to imagine a form for the uncertain boundaries and contours of consciousness. Both lack a verifiable content and are therefore apparently beyond the power of language to define or accommodate. This chapter suggests that the models of subjectivity presented in her fiction seek to integrate a revelatory encounter with an idealist absolute with the incontrovertible material evidence of alternative forms of consciousness being presented by the ‘new psychology’.

This chapter demonstrates the persistence of vitalism into and beyond the First World War. It shows how the distinctions between the ‘real’ individual and the ‘unreal’ mass, between the authentic self and inauthentic ‘abstractions’ and causes, and between the freewoman/superman and the bondwoman/bondman, are central to a range of modernist novels by Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf and May Sinclair. It also shows how, paradoxically, insofar as realism was dismissed by modernists as a genre consisting of abstractions and devoted to causes, some realist works were themselves opposed to abstractions and causes, including Cicely Hamilton’s novel, William - An Englishman (1919). The chapter considers the pressure on women writers in particular to assert their selfhood in a eugenicist climate in which women were defined as ‘carriers of the race’. It argues that women writers were attracted to stream-of-consciousness fiction as a genre that asserted a unique individual consciousness (durée) in the face of eugenics

This chapter traces women writers’ reinterpretations and re-workings of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘feminist voice’ between 1910 and 1940, considering political and auto/biographical writing by Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair and Vera Brittain, before focusing on the new spinster heroines of modernist novels such as Sinclair’s The Three Sisters and Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street. These prominent inter-war literary writers are worth (re-)exploring for the ways in which they challenged and reconfigured assumptions about the Victorian family, often through invoking the ‘myth’ of Charlotte Brontë. This post-Victorian mythologising of Charlotte as both dutiful daughter and champion of female singleness was important to feminists, as they traced the genealogies of the woman writer and of women’s political achievements. For women writers from the 1910s to the 1940s, Charlotte Brontë is revered as a figure emblematic of the Victorian daughter’s entrapment within the patriarchal household, and as a pioneering woman writer who created modern, rebellious heroines. Looking back to representations of solitude, independence and singleness in Charlotte’s letters and in her last novel, Villette, modernist authors used their spinster heroines to reject purely domestic identities in order to embrace the world of paid work.

“Bringing Women Together, in Theory” explores which theories allow feminist modernist scholars to treat as worthy subjects of study more women writers than just those representative few about whom most monographs have been written, thus levelling the playing field between so-called major and minor writers. In the late twentieth-century the historically tense relationship between feminist criticism’s roots in liberal humanism, even as it has had to argue against its definitional constraints, put it in conceptual tension with post-structuralist theory from which feminist theory stemmed. These differences created a contentious and hierarchical relationship in the late-twentieth century between feminist scholars of modernism from which we may now just be emerging. This chapter analyzes the work of May Sinclair and also explores affect theory, low theory, transvaluation, and skepticism.

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.