Review: Mary Olivier, a Life

Mary Olivier, a Life by May Sinclair
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Breathtaking beauty inhabits every tiny little moment of this book, the story of a young genius learning, struggling, but building confidence and capacity layer by layer until she launches herself, confident, into her public. “There isn't any risk. This time it was clear, clear as the black pattern the sycamore makes on the sky. If it never came again I should remember.” What a fantastically inspirational text, in a way the high modernists, Woolf, and Joyce, and Pound and all the others, could never be. May Sinclair deserves to be taught in our schools in preparation to read these — or instead of!

Where the early generation of novel was always about marriage, from Clarissa and Tom Jones to Jane Austen, and the Edwardian novel is obsessed with adultery, Mary’s life story is of the spinster who comes to care for her mother, the philosopher artist and her progress of reading and consciousness, and how these two sides of her life play against each other to offer self actualization.

She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree.

Romance occurs, but men are to Mary only as the tree in the grey sky, the offer and the illusion, selves of God on display in innumerable forms. Olivier’s monism is evidently informed by Spinoza and Hegel, but also Beethoven, and the deaths of her brothers, and the painful, impassable gap of understanding between the proto-modern Mary and her put-upon Catholic mother. This book sparkles with insights at the psychology of the fragmented self repaired, stitched out of queer romantic shards of nineteenth century thought, to be sure, but with a collage effect of color and sound and knowledge and feeling that honestly brings me to tears just to write of it.

This is the most moving novel I’ve read since Middlemarch, and if it cannot approach that earlier work on its range of psychological insight, it more than makes up with depth of self-absorption, and of facing the structures and systems that warp, obstruct, but ultimately also constitute, the self.

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