Mary Olivier by May Sinclair

First published: 1919

Type of work: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: 1865-1910

Locale: Essex and Yorkshire

Principal Characters:

• Mary Olivier, the protagonist, the center of consciousness in the novel
• Emilius Olivier, her father, a domestic tyrant
• Caroline Olivier, her mother, a woman who lives through her children
• Mark Olivier, the eldest of Mary’s three brothers, a career army officer in India
• Jimmy Ponsonby, his schoolboy friend
• Maurice Jourdain, Mary’s fiance, too conventional a man to meet her emotional needs
• Mr. Sutcliffe, the squire of Greffington Hall, a married man half in love with Mary
• Richard Nicholson, Sutcliffe’s nephew, a classics scholar who appreciates Mary’s work as a poet and translator

The Novel

Tracing Mary Olivier’s evolving consciousness from her first memory of lying in her crib at the age of two, May Sinclair stresses the basis in experience of her protagonist’s psychological development. Mary’s earliest memories are of sharing her parents’ bedroom, of being attracted to her mother’s breast and repulsed by her father’s lifted nightshirt. She senses the tension that exists between her parents and creates a scene when, carried down to the family dinner table, she is forced to sit on Emilius’ lap and sip from his glass of port. Mary recognizes that she cannot depend upon her mother’s and father’s feelings for her. Emilius gives her a stuffed lamb for a birthday gift, but he also allows her to run and fall in the dining room, cutting her head on a metal fireguard. Caroline is terrified by the accident into an expression of maternal concern, but Mary knows that she comes behind her brothers Mark, Daniel, and Rodney, in her mother’s heart.

Emilius and Caroline force Mary and her brothers to conform to rigid patterns of conventional behavior. They hold out as examples of the consequences of wrong conduct a series of relatives. Whenever she questions religious training, Mary is reminded of the case of Emilius’ sister Lavinia, a spinster who has converted to Unitarianism. Whenever Mary shows interest in young men, her parents refer to the case of Aunt Charlotte, Emilius’ other sister, a woman beset with the conviction that every man she has glimpsed wants to marry her. Mary’s eldest brother, Mark, escapes the claustrophobic family atmosphere by becoming a career army officer and shipping out to India. Rodney emigrates to Canada to become a farmer, but he comes home to die when his heart cannot withstand the physical strain. Daniel, like his father, finds solace in drinking and depends for employment on Emilius’ brother Victor.

On the surface, Mary is more victimized than her brothers by her parents’ notions of propriety. Poorly educated and untrained for any occupation except wife or companion to elderly parents, Mary reads hungrily, initially in the classics, which formed the foundation of her brothers’ education, and later in the works of Benedict de Spinoza, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Charles Darwin. She seeks answers to questions about the meaning of human existence, and in her search for answers draws close to a series of men. Her adolescent attraction to Mark’s schoolmate Jimmy Ponsonby, sent to Australia for a breach of the public school code, gives way to a more mature attraction to Maurice Jourdain. Nearly twenty years her senior, Jourdain seems to be sympathetic to her need to explore ideas, but when Mary sees that he does not want her to be his intellectual equal, she turns for friendship to Mr. Sutcliffe, the squire of Greffington Hall. Mr. Sutcliffe is married; he encourages her to read and to write poetry. Mary does not recognize how he feels about her until she meets his nephew Richard Nicholson, a classics scholar who arranges the publication of her poems and of a translation of the Euripides’ Bacchae.

Richard Nicholson would be an ideal husband and companion. He is sympathetic to Mary’s interests and supports her work as a translator. By the time Mary meets him, however, she is middle-aged. Her father has suffered business losses in Essex and moved his family to Yorkshire, where his alcoholism culminates in an apoplectic stroke. Mark dies suddenly in India, and Rodney’s heart gives out despite Mary’s careful nursing. Daniel is a drunken burden, not a source of help, and Mary will not leave her mother, slipping into senility, to marry Richard. They agree to go their separate ways, and Mary learns of his marriage to another lady only ten days after Caroline Olivier’s death.

The Characters

Taken as a whole, May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier argues for treatment of women as individuals deserving the education and career opportunities given men. Mary is more intelligent and sensitive than her brothers Mark, Daniel, and Rodney. Her parents, in particular her mother Caroline, refuse to see Mary’s potential. They discourage her interest in ideas, her reading and writing, and her association with the sort of man who values her mind and sensitivity. Caroline Olivier admits, in old age, that she did not want Mary to marry or to have an education. If she had had six or seven daughters, she adds, she might have chosen one of them as her companion and allowed Mary her independence.

The focus of Sinclair’s satire is the family structure parodied in her treatment of the Oliviers. With an authoritarian father, a religious mother, dotty maiden aunts, and a dashing army-officer brother, Mary lives in a family approaching a Victorian stereotype. Nevertheless, Sinclair handles these minor characters in ways that individualize them. For example, the jealousy which fuels Emilius Olivier’s drinking and mistreatment of his sons rings true, as does the mixture of love and hatred characterizing the feelings of the boys for their mother Caroline. In Sinclair’s eyes, the mother is the villain in the piece. Her intense emotional attachments to her children weaken their wills. None of her sons marries. Mark, Daniel, and Rodney are psychologically incapable of sustaining a relationship with a woman other than their mother. Only Mary possesses the strength to break the bond with Caroline, and she chooses to accept responsibility for her mother’s care when Caroline shows signs of senility.

The men to whom Mary turns offer varying degrees of emotional and intellectual support. Her brother Mark, to whom she is drawn in childish rivalry with her mother, protects Mary from the excesses of Emilius’ behavior. When Mark is grown, however, she recognizes that his unquestioning allegiance to Caroline makes him an unreliable ally. Mark’s schoolboy friend Jimmy Ponsonby offers Mary adolescent passion, not mature love. When circumstances send Jimmy to Australia, Mary turns to Maurice Jourdain. More sympathetic than other men to Mary’s desire to educate herself, Maurice nevertheless resists her efforts to attain independence from his own opinions. He sees her education as adding polish to her girlish charm; he backs out of their engagement when he recognizes that Mary intends to think for herself. In the married Mr. Sutcliffe, Mary finds intellectual companionship and a nearly paternal interest in her attempts to become a poet and translator. She does not see that Mr. Sutcliffe is falling in love with her, but his wife senses the danger and removes her husband to France to head off a scandal. In Sutcliffe’s nephew, Richard Nicholson, Mary finds both an intellectual equal and mature sexual attraction. The brief period she spends as Richard’s mistress in London confirms Mary’s emancipation from the morality espoused by her parents. She feels no guilt about her behavior.

Sinclair peoples the novel, particularly the sections dealing with the Oliviers’ stay in Yorkshire, with a cast of local personalities whose lives are as bleak and emotionally impoverished as those of Mary and her brothers. The emphasis is on the effects of heredity and environment on personality and character. Only by assertion of her individual will does Mary shape her life to a pattern other than the one provided by her parents. Matched in this by Richard Nicholson, she provides the reader of Mary Olivier with Sinclair’s version of the new woman.

Critical Context

As the novels The Three Sisters (1914), Tree of Heaven (1917), and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1920) suggest, May Sinclair returns time and again in her work to the subject of unmarried, middle-class women living in England at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In Mary Olivier, she gives her most exhaustive, and perhaps her most satisfying, analysis of the character and situation of the kind of woman whose life attracts her. It is the character closest to Sinclair’s own life as well. Both novelist and character were two years old in 1865. Like Mary, Sinclair had an alcoholic father and a domineering mother, and suffered the decline of family fortune and status. Yet despite the persona created for herself in Mary Olivier, the book is chiefly an objective account of one woman’s successful struggle against repression. The coupling of stream-of-consciousness with third-person narrative suggests the degree to which Sinclair distanced herself from the material and became an objective analyst, even a scientific observer, during the writing of the novel itself.

In a review of a novel in Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage” series (1915-1938), Sinclair used William James’s term “stream of consciousness” to describe Richardson’s rendering of the working of a character’s mind. In Mary Olivier: A Life and Life and Death of Harriett Frean, Sinclair evolved her own kind of stream of consciousness, closer to the realism of other novelists than is Richardson’s work, to probe the minds of the women whose lives interested her. The early pages of both books compare favorably to the opening of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which he renders the language and thoughts of a young boy. Sinclair’s novel also bears favorable comparison with Samuel Butler’s Ernest Pontifex: Or, The Way of All Flesh (1903) as a study of the effects of Victorian mores on the lives of ordinary men and women. Sinclair’s is the only substantial analysis of this subject from the vantage point of a female character.

Bibliography

Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist, 1973.

Gillespie, D. F. “May Sinclair and the Stream of Consciousness: Metaphors and Metaphysics,” in English Literature in Transition. XXI, no. 2 (1978), pp.134-142.

Kaplan, S. Feminine Consciousness in the Modern Novel, 1975.

Zegger, Hrisey D. May Sinclair, 1976.