The Inner Lives of Quiet Women

Joanna Kavenna

• May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian by Suzanne Raitt
  Oxford, 307 pp, £19.99, April 2001, ISBN 0 19 812298 5

With the decline of religious faith, we drift, so it’s said, on the current, clinging to the raft of materialism. The last flickers of collective spiritual belief were doused by the technological advances and grotesque warfare of the early years of the 20th century. Which led, the argument runs, to the mimesis-warping nihilism of Dada and the Vorticists, the semiotic anarchies of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Think of Ulrich, the hero of The Man without Qualities, and his ‘dreadful feeling of blind space’, of nothingness at the heart of everything.