22 - ‘What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder’: May Sinclair’s Philosophical Idealism as Surrogate Religion

Summary

MAY SINCLAIR’S AVERSION to formal religion, and narrow religious morality in particular, dates from her childhood and is well documented. Suzanne Raitt paints Sinclair’s family home as one dominated by her mother’s ‘austere Northern Irish Protestantism’ and quotes a letter in which Sinclair describes her mother’s rule as a ‘cold, bitter, narrow tyranny’. This same ‘type’ of narrow-minded, cruel and inflexibly conformist mother recurs in Sinclair’s fiction, most notably in Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) and Arnold Waterlow: A Life (1924), and Sinclair’s own escape – which becomes a method of escape for both Mary and Arnold in their turn – from the limiting strictures of this Protestantism came through much reading in idealist philosophy. Sinclair read voraciously, particularly in idealist traditions, and in 1917 and 1922 she published her own two volumes of idealist philosophy, A Defence of Idealism and The New Idealism. In both volumes she draws on the wide reading of her youth, apologising in the latter work for any omission of very recent idealist thinkers: ‘for years I was satisfied with Kant and Hegel relieved by Schopenhauer and Mr. Bradley’. Mary and Arnold, too, read Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. They also read Spinoza, Locke, Plato, Hume, Schwegler, Buddhist sutras and Hindu Upanishads and the Vedanta (Mary); Spinoza, Berkeley, Plato and Aristotle (Arnold). It is tempting to parse both Mary’s and Arnold’s reading journeys as only lightly fictionalised versions of Sinclair’s own youthful quest, but there are omissions. They do not read F. H. Bradley, whose most influential work Appearance and Reality was published in 1893. As Mary’s life is explicitly covered from 1865 to 1910 and Arnold’s runs a similar course (he is born in 1863, as was Sinclair herself) this seems odd. Sinclair in The New Idealism speaks of her ‘years of devotion to Mr. Bradley’s Absolute’. She was also strongly influenced by T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) which likewise doesn’t appear in either novel.