Plan Main part. Circular narrative structure and its importance in teaching foreign language 3 The implementation of the circular narrative structure by May Sinclair in English classes 19 Conclusion 25 References 28 Introduction

1.2 The life, works and influence of May Sinclair in language learning and teaching
May Sinclair was a novelist, poet, philosopher, translator, and critic. She was both popular and extremely prolific, writing twenty-three novels, thirty-nine short stories, and several poetry collections throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a critic she promoted the work of Ezra Pound and the Imagist poets, and the novelist Dorothy Richardson, among others. She also wrote works of philosophy, and was actively involved in the key issues of her day: writing pamphlets for the suffrage movement, studying and propagating psycho-analytic thought, reviewing and responding to the birth of modernism, Vorticism and imagism. She even visited Belgium as part of an ambulance unit at the beginning of the First World War.⁷
The Nineteenth Century
On the 24th of August 1863 May Sinclair was born Mary Amelia St Clair Sinclair, the youngest child of six, and the only surviving daughter of William and Amelia Sinclair. The Sinclair family lived at the time in Thorncote, Rock Park, Higher Bebington, near to Liverpool, where William Sinclair worked.
Very little is known about the next thirty years of Sinclair’s life. The family moved around the country, with the possessions they had salvaged from their financial ruin, and Sinclair’s father William became increasingly dependent on alcohol. In 1872 the family moved to Ilford, just outside of London, and in the autumn of 1881, when Sinclair was 18, she was sent to Cheltenham Ladies College. She was here for just one year, but she studied scripture, history, literature, English language, geography, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, natural science, physics, physiology, chemistry, French, German Latin and Greek. She also studied philosophy. The head teacher, Dorothea Beale, had noticed May Sinclairs gift for intellectual enquiry, and encouraged her to become a philosopher. Sinclair wrote her first philosophical essays and poems for the Cheltenham Ladies College Magazine between the years 1882 and 1898. The relationship between Sinclair and Beale was a formative one. As Suzanne Raitt says, the head teacher was more than just a mentor; she encouraged Sinclair’s intellectual aspirations, and consolidated her emerging sense of herself as a thinker, a woman of ideas.
William Sinclair died on the 19th November 1881, and in 1882 the Sinclairs moved again, to Forest Gate, and then again, shortly after Sinclair returned from Cheltenham, the family moved north, to Gresford in North Wales. However, despite the extreme stress and pressure of her family’s situation, May Sinclair was still studying and writing philosophy, and she was also writing poetry.
In 1886, Sinclair’s first book, Nakiketas and Other Poems was published, under the pseudonym Julian Sinclair. The next few years were no less stressful. One brother, Harold, died in 1887, and then May Sinclair’s favourite brother, Frank, died in 1889. In 1890, Sinclair, her mother, and the only brother left at home, Reginald, moved to Sidmouth, on the South Devon Coast. The change of air was meant to benefit Reginald’s health, but it was not enough: he died in 1891. Through all this tragedy and upheaval Sinclair continued to immerse herself in her reading and her philosophical study, and to write: Essays in Verse was published in 1892, and her first paid prose piece, The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism followed in 1893.
In 1893, Sinclair met the curate Anthony Deane, and in 1894 she met Professor Henry Melvill Gwatkin. Both men were religious, and Gwatkin particularly entered into religious debate with the agnostic Sinclair in an effort to restore her faith in Christianity. Sinclair’s relationship with Deane, however, had another element. She seems to have been in love with him, and he took the place of a literary and professional mentor as well as friend and romantic attachment.4 The two interests were not separate. Raitt’s description of the young curate in 1894 ‘writing long letters, recommending books, and climbing the steep path to Sinclair’s house to engage her in intense and deeply felt debate indicates that, for Sinclair, the romantic and the intellectual were deeply entwined. However, in 1896, Deane became engaged to somebody else, by which time Sinclair was in London, in financial trouble, looking for work as a teacher, and translating books for small amounts of money. May Sinclair moved to London in or around 1896, and in 1897 her first novel, Audrey Craven, was published. Suzanne Raitt writes that Sinclair’s debut as a published novelist marked the end of an era both in terms of her intellectual life and her emotional attachments.
In 1907, the newly secure May Sinclair moved into a flat of her own in Kensington. She was now a fully-fledged independent woman. She was also becoming increasingly involved with the suffrage movement, writing letters in the suffragist periodical Votes for Women, and joining the Women’s Freedom League in 1908.She was meeting important people on the other side of the Atlantic as well. In October 1908 Sinclair she met Thomas Hardy for the first time, and the two went cycling together, from Dorchester to Weymouth. Hardy admired Sinclair’s work, and she was in turn delighted by his admiration. She told Katherine Hinkson in a letter that she had lost her heart to the author. Sinclair also met Ezra Pound in 1908, and would become both his financial patron and advocate for his work. Through him she met H.D. and Richard Aldington in 1911, and she became a champion of these imagist poets, of T.S. Eliot, and of Vorticism. In 1913 May Sinclair met Charlotte Mew, whose long poem The Farmer’s Bride she admired, and the two had a brief but intense friendship.
These years also saw the beginning of Sinclair’s literary and scholarly focus on the Bronte sisters. Between the years 1908 and 1921, she wrote introductions to the new Everyman editions of Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte, and the novels of Charlotte, Anne and Emily. The Three Brontes, a full length work of criticism and biography was published in 1912, and The Three Sisters, a novel which draws on the lives of the three daughters of a poor curate, locked in a house somewhere near the moors in Yorkshire, followed in 1914.Her interest in the Brontes led to a literary fascination with ghosts and the macabre. The ghost stories that make up the Uncanny Stories collection, written from 1910 on, can be usefully read alongside her fascination with the Bronte legacy: particularly Wuthering Heights, and the ghost of Emily Bronte which Sinclair confronts in her book The Three Brontes. Sinclair was becoming increasingly fascinated by the uncanny, and by psychoanalysis more generally. She became involved with the Medico-Psychological Clinic in 1913, donating large sums of money to the establishment of its practice and to its Fund for Nerve-Shocked Soldiers in 1914. At the outset of the First World War, May Sinclair was keen to help the war effort as much as possible. Hector Munro, who Sinclair knew through the Medico-Psychological Clinic, was setting up an ambulance unit, and needed her help in drumming up financial support. She was anxious to get to the war, and to help, but when she arrived in Belgium she didn’t have very much to do and was quickly sent home. Her observations, however, were written up in Journal of Impressions in Belgium, which was among the first journals of the war written from the perspective published in Britain.
In April 1918, May Sinclair reviewed Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series in The Egoist. She expressed admiration for the novels, and the way in which Richardson’s technique had developed in order to portray life as it is lived: the inner life, of stream of consciousness. Her reading of Richardson fed into the writing of Mary Olivier: A Life, which was published in 1919. Mary Olivier is semi-autobiographical, and charts the protagonist’s coming-of-age: her intellectual questing and romantic yearnings in a household dominated by a selfish mother and unsympathetic father. It charts the inner life of Mary, much as Pilgrimage charts the inner life of Miriam Henderson. From 1896 Sinclair wrote professionally to support herself and her mother, who died in 1901. An active feminist, Sinclair treated a number of themes relating to the position of women and marriage. Her works sold well in the United States. May Sinclair entering Kensington's Women's Social and Political Union shop in 1910. Sinclair's suffrage activities were remembered by Sylvia Pankhurst. Photographs as "Mary Sinclair" show her around the WSPU offices in Kensington. In 1912 the Women Writers' Suffrage League published her ideas on feminism. Here she de-bunked theories put forward by Sir Almroth Wright that the suffragists were powered by their sexual frustration because of the shortage of men. She said that suffrage and the class struggle were similar aspirations and the working woman should not be in competition with the ambitions of the male working class.
Around 1913, she was a founding supporter of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London which was run by Dr Jessie Murray. Sinclair became interested in psychoanalytic thought, and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization that aided wounded Belgian soldiers on the Western Front in Flanders. She was sent home after only a few weeks at the front; she wrote about the experience in both prose and poetry. Her 1913 novel The Combined Maze, the story of a London clerk and the two women he loves, was highly praised by critics, including George Orwell, while Agatha Christie considered it one of the greatest English novels of its time. She wrote early criticism on Imagism and the poet H. D. in The Egoist she was on social terms with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound at the time.
The works of May Sinclair
The Divine Fire (1904)
The Helpmate (1907)
The Judgment of Eve (1907) stories
The Immortal Moment (1908)
Kitty Tailleur (1908)
Outlines of Church History by Rudolph Sohm (1909) translator
The Creators (1910)
Miss Tarrant's Temperament (1911) in Harper's Magazine
The Flaw in the Crystal (1912)
The Three Brontes (1912)
Feminism (1912) pamphlet for Women's Suffrage League
Sinclair’s novels from 1920 onwards, in Suzanne Raitt’s words, suggest that her thoughts were turning to the years ahead and to the possibility of a long, slow decline with no immediate family no children of her own to take care of her. She was both anticipating the petty humiliations of age and illness, and returning to the stories and characters of her past. The 1922 novella, Life and Death of Harriett Frean, with its tragic tale of a spinster who can never escape her mother’s influence, even in death, is one of the finest of these.
May Sinclair suffered from Parkinson’s disease in the final years of her life, and disappeared from public view. She was living with her companion and housekeeper Florence Bartrop in Buckinghamshire. Her friends lost contact with her from the late 1920s onwards, and she eventually died in 1946.
Some aspects of Sinclair's subsequent novels have been traced as influenced by modernist techniques, particularly in the autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life . She was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers. Sinclair wrote two volumes of supernatural fiction, Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931). E.F.Bleiler called Sinclair "an underrated writer" and described Uncanny Stories as "excellent". Gary Crawford has stated Sinclair's contribution to the supernatural fiction genre, "small as it is, is notable". Jacques Barzun included Sinclair among a list of supernatural fiction writers that "one should make a point of seeking out". Brian Stableford has stated that Sinclair's "supernatural tales are written with uncommon delicacy and precision, and they are among the most effective examples of their fugitive kind". Andrew Smith has described Uncanny Stories as "an important contribution to the ghost story".
Similarly, as for influence of May Sinclair in language learning and teaching, her pioneering work in the field of modernist literature and studies in human psychology and consciousness has greatly influenced language learning and teaching, particularly in terms of her approach to language acquisition and the role of fiction as a tool for understanding complex linguistic concepts. Sinclair was known for her experimentation with language and form and her exploration of themes related to the human psyche, particularly consciousness and perception. Her works, such as "The Life and Death of Harriett Frean" and "Mary Olivier: A Life," use complex language and structure to convey the internal struggles and psychological states of her characters.
Sinclair's contribution to language learning can be seen in her belief that language is the key to unlocking the mysteries of human consciousness. Her literary works demonstrate the importance of learning the nuances of language, particularly the use of vocabulary, syntax, and stylistic devices, in order to communicate complex ideas and to accurately express one's thoughts and emotions to others. Moreover, Sinclair's works highlight the importance of fiction as a tool for language learners. Reading literary classics and analyzing their language and structure can greatly improve language acquisition, as they provide a rich and immersive environment for learners to practice their language skills and develop their critical thinking and analytical abilities.
Briefly, May Sinclair's life and works have greatly influenced the field of language acquisition and literary studies, and her pioneering approach to language learning and the role of language in understanding the human psyche continues to inspire educators and language learners alike.