May Sinclair, Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery and the Brontës

After producing some articles about May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal, I decided to investigate her background in the hope of finding some more material of interest. 

I found some very familiar biographical elements and other connections when reading about her life. I mentioned a blueprint for writers in an article in the Context and the Total Picture series; if I created a template for writers of interest, May Sinclair would tick many of the boxes.

I have seen, for example, the Celtic Connection in the biographies of many novelists, so it was no surprise to learn that May Sinclair had an Irish mother and a Scottish father.

It also came as no surprise when I found that she had some other things in common with Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery. May Sinclair too was interested in and inspired by the Brontës, whose works she may have first encountered in her father's private library rather than the local public library.

May Sinclair and Jean Rhys
May Sinclair was a very different person from Jean Rhys, but they had a few things in common:

They both wrote under assumed names. 

Both novelists lived for a while in Devon.

They both read voraciously as girls, partly for escape, and both later wrote Brontë-inspired books. 

They both had unsympathetic mothers who tried to force them to conform to the norm. They had some things to say about their childhood experiences that sound uncannily similar. 

Just as Jean Rhys's work is mostly autobiographical, so are some of May Sinclair's novels, Mary Olivier in particular. Mary Olivier's mother wants her to behave like a 'normal' girl:

“...you should try and behave a little more like other people.”

"You were different," she said. "You weren’t like any of the others. I was afraid of you.”

Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery, Jane Eyre and public libraries

Terry Pratchett has said that he owes a great debt to the public libraries that he used as a boy.

Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery are two more novelists who were great readers and had access to a public library when young. As girls they read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which made a big impression on them and later influenced their writing.

Jean Rhys and the public library

As mentioned in the article about psychological black magic, Jean Rhys wrote a prequel to Jane Eyre: Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be her finest work. 

Carole Angier says in her biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that Jean Rhys was a member of the Hamilton Public Library in the British West Indies island of Dominica as a girl, and this was where she first encountered Jane Eyre. The course of her life might have been very different if she had not read this book at an impressionable age, and Wide Sargasso Sea might never have been written.

Jean Rhys had a lot of trouble with this book, which was probably started around 1945 but not published until 1966.

She said that she went to the local public library in Bude in Cornwall in 1957 to get a copy of Jane Eyre. She wanted to re-read it to refresh her memory of Mr Rochester's mad wife, whose story she was telling in Wide Sargasso Sea.

L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.