Product Description

'Well, I'm glad my little girl didn't snatch and push. It's better to go without than to take from other people. That's ugly.' Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, renunciation of this unworthy passion initially brings her a peculiar sort of happiness. But the passing of time reveals a different truth. Ironic, brief and intensely realised, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) is a brilliant study of female virtue seen as vice, and stands with the work of Virgina Woolf and Dorothy Richardson as one of the great innovative novels of the century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217228 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'Exceptionally modern in flavour and shocking in intensity' COSMOPOLITAN 'A little masterpiece, a disturbing analysis of English class and character' NEW STATESMAN Hermione Lee in the TLS: 'When the histories of modernism are rewritten, no one will be able to ignore May Sinclair again'

About the Author
Born in Liverpool in 1863, May Sinclair had no formal education until the age of 18. She worked with Cicely Hamilton and Violet Hunt for the Suffragist cause and wrote a total of 24 novels in addition to philosophical works, poetry and criticism. She died in 1932.

Customer Reviews

Modernism at it's best
I read this novel as part of a course studying Modernism, and for me it was the most accessible, the most enjoyable and the deepest text I had to read.

It's superficially simplistic. The language is simple and the print large. It almost looks like a child's book - but that is the point. The question we're left with at the end is whether Harriett Frean remains much the same age at death as when she was born.

Short, sprightly-paced, I can see myself picking this up and reading it again if I have a morning to spare. I knew the outcome was inevitable the first time through, but it didn't cease to be powerful and almost tragic. Whilst one of the things we are encouraged to think about by the author is whether Harriett chooses this life of unfulfilment or whether she couldn't have it any other way, it doesn't stop you feeling for her.

In many ways, Harriett reflects part of our character which we like to think represents us at our best, making sacrifices for others. If it were not so sad, this novel would be satire. I think we can all sympathise with Harriett's plight in places, and learn from it what can happen if we make the same mistakes.

Never didactic, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a novel which, whilst written as an elegy for unemancipated women, can now be applied to anybody who wastes their lives thinking of everybody but themselves.

A pioneer in Modernist literature
May Sinclair is, sadly, not a well-known name in the literary world today, but in her time she was a household name. Having coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" writing herself, the book centres around the character of the eponymous Harriet Frean. Although short, the book details the entirety of the character's life, with Harriet's main aim being to "behave beautifully", as her mother would have wanted.

The novel leaves one questioning how much of our own happiness are we willing to sacrifice in order to stay within the boundaries of the "social norm".

This is a great book, tinged greatly by the overwhelming sadness that seems to follow the protagonist around. Even when the inevitable happens at the end of the novel we still sympathise with Harriet right up to the very end. This book proves that the Modernists certainly did not sacrifice characterisation in order to develop their own Modernist style.