The Tree of Heaven

by May Sinclair

Author, poet, critic, and suffragist Mary Amelia St. Clair was a contemporary of and acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West, among others. She served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and produced poetry and fiction based on it. The Tree of Heaven draws upon Sinclair's experiences in the war. Concerned with the Harrisoon family, it follows the three children, Michael, Nicky, and Dorothy, as they grow up in the 1900s and face the war as young adults. Dorothy hosts a sufragette meeting that lands her in jail, then trains with the Red Cross and joins an ambulance unit in Belgium. Michael is a poet involved with avant-garde artists, embracing pacifism and resisting family pressure to join up. Nicky is an engineer who enlists early and invents an early prototype of the tank.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, British Literature, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Historical Fiction, World War I

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair, a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. May Sinclair was also a significant critic, in the area of modernist poetry and prose and she is attributed with first using the term stream of consciousness) in a literary context, when reviewing the first volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67), in The Egoist, April 1918.

Reviews

[Kirsty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another utterly fantastic May Sinclair novel. Beginning in Hampstead in 1895, at the advent of the Boer War, and finishing somewhere near the end of the First World War, the historical context is wide and sweeping. The extended family dynamic which Sinclair presents here is nothing short of fascinating. The whole is incredibly well written, which will surprise nobody who has read any of Sinclair's work in the past. Every single character is rendered realistically and believably, and I could hardly bear to put it down. The Tree of Heaven is important, fascinating, and rather wonderful novel.

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
Follows the fortunes of the Harrison family between the Boer War and World War 1. Frances and Anthony, the loving parents, and their children, Nicky, Michael, Dorothy, and the more forgettable John. There is also Vera, Anthony's Sister-in-law. She leads a scandalous life that was fairly shocking for the times so her daughter, Ronnie, goes to live with the family too. The characters were well drawn, which was just as well since there were so many of them. In other hands it could have got rather confusing. I loved reading about them as they grew up and had difficult decisions to make, the boys about whether to join up or not, and Dorothy about her role in the suffragettes.
This is the first May Sinclair book I have read, but I will be reading more of hers.

[Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone's Ash Tree is another's Tree of Heaven

The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair is a classic novel written in 1917 and recently republished as part of the British Library Women Writers series.

The book tells the Harrison Family's story before and during the First World War.

Anthony, Francis, Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas, and John Harrison were a wealthy English family living their everyday lives, unaware of the events that would forever change their way of living.

While Francis had a calm and maybe a little oblivious nature, Anthony was all reality and practicality.

I loved how she saw the tree in their yard as a Tree of Heaven, even though Anthony brought up endless proof that it was an ordinary ash tree.

As the story progresses and the kids grow, they get entangled in significant historical events such as the Suffrage Movement and World War I.

The Suffrage Movement's views are especially interesting as the book was published a year before women were finally allowed to vote (not yet all women, only those above 30yo and with property qualifications).

The Tree of Heaven is an entrancing account of how ordinary people's lives changed during WWI. It is somehow scary to realize how the certainties of today can be the uncertainties of tomorrow.

This new edition of the classic, published by the British Library Publishing, is simply stunning! I especially loved the embossed flowers on the cover and the Afterword that helped me contextualize some of the historical information gathered from the book.

Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Gina House · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5🌟 Sadly, this book wasn't for me. Thankfully, May Sinclair's beautiful writing kept me reading, but the content itself was much too painful to enjoy The Tree of Heaven overall.

The Harrison Family (Antony, Frances, Dorothy, Michael, Nicholas and John), along with their cousin Veronica, are wonderful characters. They each stand out distinctly and play specific roles when it comes to the war. I thought of these true-to-life characters often after finishing the book.

I could not bear to read the excruciating details of war wounds, suffering and everything that is (unfortunately) true and horrible about any war. This is the opposite of all of my favorite war-time cozy novels. There is nothing cozy about May Sinclair's book. If I hadn't appreciated the writing (and also this family) so much, I would have stopped reading after a few chapters.

If you're a sensitive person, I wouldn't recommend reading The Tree of Heaven. Though, if you love the British Library Women Writers series, suffragettes, politics and you don't mind reading about the horrible suffering that soldiers and families had to endure during the first World War, you may find this to be a new favorite. Unfortunately, I don't think I could read this again.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt, as I read this novel, that it really wasn’t a very good novel — certainly not up to the standard that I had expected of this author after having read The Romantic or The Three Sisters. But it had a tremendous impact on me nonetheless, partly because it concerns issues relating to my own ancestry which are presently challenging me and partly because the novel has a “raw” quality which not only demonstrates the state of mind of the author but also seems to elicit a similar emotional state in the reader.

May Sinclair was writing this novel during the early years of World War One; in fact, the war was still raging at the time of publication in 1917. England was in dire straits and undoubtedly many citizens were emotionally off-balance. The novel appears to be a product of Sinclair’s own attempt to understand the social and political circumstances which had developed into a catastrophe of such dimensions. I wonder to what extent the raw quality of the prose reflects the author’s own emotional state as well.

The story tells of the life during the early years of the 20th century of one English couple, Anthony and Frances Harrison, and their four children. Occasional appearances by the mother and three sisters of Frances as well as by Anthony’s brother and his wife and daughter round out the plot. With her trademark keen understanding of human psychology, Sinclair grabs the attention of the reader with a fascinating cast of unique personalities.

The novel is presented in three parts, each of which is divided into multiple chapters. Part One familiarizes the reader with all of the main characters. The children are young and the family is often seen gathering around the “tree of heaven” of the title, which is the centerpiece of the garden on their property. The family lives a very comfortable life, with Anthony managing his own very successful timber business and Frances completely absorbed by the lives and happiness of their children. The secondary characters seem to drop into and out of the story, creating a realistic swirl of family discord and dysfunction.

Part Two, sub-titled “The Vortex”, advances several years ahead to describe some of the social and political upheaval of the time — the suffrage movement, the Modernist movement, the recent decline in sexual morality — to demonstrate to the reader the ways in which these impact the family. Each of the three eldest children (all adults by this time) encounters some aspect of The Vortex in the activities and relationships of their lives, and deals with the challenges in their own way.

The eldest son, Michael, is a poet, a sensitive soul who, from childhood, prefers the solitude of his own company and adamantly refuses to be drawn into “the herd”. As a boy, he refused to attend a birthday party because it would cause him to forget pieces of me that I want to remember. At a party I can't feel all of myself at once.

Dorothy becomes involved in the suffrage movement. She is an intelligent and independent young woman who states very clearly the limits of her commitment to the movement but nonetheless is drawn into an explosive situation, with significant consequences. The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and swerve away before the thing got her.

Nicholas, the second son, is an enigma to everyone in the family, quickly bouncing back from every personal calamity and moving comfortably and optimistically on to the next situation. Whatever happened, and something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. . . . Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen, would ever take him at a disadvantage.

As Part Two draws to a close, no one is expecting the complete upheaval which will descend upon the country with the onset of the Great War.

Part Three describes the varied experiences of family members during the early years of World War One. A blend of intense and mixed emotions — hope, determination, fear, anxiety, grief, anticipation, love, loneliness, to name a few — are combined in letters, lengthy conversations and inner dialogues. I found this section of the novel to be particularly challenging. The prose caused me to feel confused and disoriented, perhaps mirroring the state of the nation and the personal lives of its citizens. Emotionally, a great deal is demanded of the reader.

When the novel ends, the war has not — and the reader, like the characters in the story, is left with feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and foreboding. It occurs to me now that perhaps this was the intended effect and that the author has done a superb job of this very ambitious piece of writing. Maybe it deserves four stars after all!

My reviews of other novels by May Sinclair
The Tysons: Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson (15/12/14) ★★★★
The Three Sisters (07/08/16) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The Romantic (12/10/19) ★ ★ ★ ★
The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (11/05/19) ★ ★ ★
The Flaw in the Crystal (20/03/20) ★ ★ ★
Anne Severn and the Fieldings (12/08/21) ★ ★ ★ ★
Far End (22/01/22) ★ ★
Audrey Craven (25/03/22) ★ ★ ★ ★
Mr. Waddington of Wyck (14/11/22) ★ ★
The Tree of Heaven (02/09/23) ★ ★ ★ ★
The Rector of Wyck (31/05/24) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

[Perry Whitford · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The Tree of Heaven' is the story of a blossoming upper middle-class family in time of peace and in time of war during the last years of the 19th century and first years of the 20th, leading up to WWI. The patriarch is Anthony Harrison, the matriarch Francis Harrison, for whom 'nothing in the world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her children; her children first and Anthony after them.'

The Harrison's consist of various children of differing temperaments, as well as extended family of spinterish sisters, adulterers and drunks. The depiction of the children in the first part are as true to childhood as any I can recall reading before, as are the depictions of youthful characters blossoming into adulthood in the second part.

As this happens, the children become involved in various issues of the day, such as the Suffrage movement, Irish Home Rule, labour strikes etc. For Frances, sees it the family provides the shade under the tree of Heaven, all else outside the shade is 'the Vortex that seized on youth and forced it into a corrupt maturity'.

This is the second book I have read by May Sinclair, a seldom heralded author from her time yet one that i have discovered to be unusually perceptive, adept at writing diologue simple yet devastating in the truths it reveals. The characters in this book are unusually modern in their outlook too, which further recommends it.

[Lianakay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a little unsure about this in the beginning, but it quickly blossomed into a beautiful, intense, and moving story of a family navigating their world in the lead up to and during World War I. Knowing it was written in 1917, when the author was living through the war herself and had no idea what the outcome would be, makes it even more compelling. I didn't realise how captivated by the story and how involved with the characters I had become until towards the end when I was genuinely feeling the events.

Important note - much use of the word 'funk', eg. 'I funked it.' Funk = avoid from fear
Statements made much more sense once I clarified this.

[Rachel Venturini · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what the blurb makes it out to be. The blurb has blurred lines to make the book sound as though it is about Dorothea and her place in the suffrage movement with stories of her brothers intertwined. It is actually the story of her brothers, predominantly from there mother’s point of view, and they’re lives from infant to adult. Maybe two to three chapters on suffrage. It was an ok book once you got into part two (I honestly nearly put it down before then) but don’t appreciate the marketing ploy of presenting it as a female lead novel. It is a female author and the female characters are brilliant but it’s more about how their lives fit around the men’s.

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this story- the characters were so well written. I enjoyed watching the development of the family as a whole, and as individuals over their lives; and I loved the way major issues in England at the time were woven into the story. I feel like stories often have a specific historical event as a focus, and I thought it was interesting to imagine how a variety of societal forces at the time of the story might have impacted families. A number of significant philosophical questions are also considered. This would be a great one to discuss with others.

[kikbim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of the bourgeois Harrison family as it moves -- or fails to shake itself from its 19th century immobilism -- against the backdrop of the last decade of the Victorian Age and the start of the WWI era, as portrayed by feminist author May Sinclair.

Daughter Dorothy starts in the footsteps of the author, so to speak, as she becomes part of the Women's Franchise Union, only to later dismiss it as the 'silly suffrage' idea once the war breaks out. Unlike the author, she doesn't follow the ambulance service to Belgium, because her prospective husband asks her not to, as he would fight 'comfy' if he knew her safe at home.

The mother makes no secret of preferring her male sons to her daughter, because of their very maleness and perfect virility. Daughter Dorothy has always known this, bears no grudge, and almost finds it natural.

Given the time period, the brothers get involved in the war.

One enlists voluntarily; another, an avantgardist poet whose friends sound like Futurists, at first rejects the idea of becoming one with this mass effort. Only for him to enlist after pressure from family and other events. By the end he is happy with what he's done notwithstanding his original repulsion and scorn for the annhilation of the self war propaganda engenders.

The only one to condemn war as a 'filthy' thing is Mrs Harrison's brother, a failure of a man according to his family, who had a nasty time of it during the Boer War. Otherwise the conflict is seen as necessary and protective of democracy, and though painful, embraced.

Now this was written in 1917, and one supposes war criticism wouldn't perhaps fly then, but this is miles away from any Wilfred Owen.

Here it is almost dulce et decorum to die for a concept of England that wasn't loved til a moment before.

The recognition of these sweeping movements that take you in is spot on but perhaps not critical enough for a modern audience. I keep trying to sift the author's purpose to find out whether she subscribes to her characters' final position, because she's good enough when it comes to highlighting all of the nays, but then they get nullified by the plot.

So I wonder if the writer is merely trying to point out these processes without commenting on them, but her stance is hard to suss out.

Good style and rounded, realistic characters. I'm willing to explore more of Sinclair's output

[Toni Wyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of the evolution of an English family. Frances and Anthony try to live a peaceful existence. They have a big house and four children. Three sons and one daughter. Anthony is a true ‘head of family’ who takes on the care of Frances mother, her three sisters, her brother, and also his brother’s family, including raising his brother’s daughter, Veronica.

The book follows everyone until the children are all adults and the First World War is underway. There is a tree in their backyard that Frances calls The Tree of Heaven, even though Anthony, who is a timber company owner, tells her it is a simple ash tree. The family’s life centers around the tree as if it is the symbol of their true home.

The book is quite good, but there are a few places where it becomes drawn out and I started to lose interest. Worth reading.

[Alizee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded up 3.5/5

[Genevieve Helene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This follows a family through the suffragette movement and the first world war. It has taken me a while to read as whilst progressing through the book I didn't feel particularly compelled to pick it up to read but each time I did, I did enjoy reading it. It is a good book that is well written but it didn't draw me in. Pleasant characters, well depicted but somehow I never felt familiar with them or cared very much about them.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most interesting aspect of this novel is that it is a book about World War I written and published well before the war concluded and is therefore an interesting window into the uncertainties people faced during it. Unfortunately, that is confined to the final third of the book. The preceding two hundred pages are more of a coming of age story about the Harrison siblings as we follow them from early childhood to young adulthood.

I did ultimately find this a bit disappointing simply because every description of this book bills it as a story about the daughter of the family Dorothea and her involvement in women’s suffrage. In reality the discussion of the women’s vote is confined to a couple of chapters and the movement is presented as a ridiculous and even a little deranged group of self indulgent women. Rather strange given that the author was a suffragette and wrote eloquently on feminism elsewhere.

The real stars of the story are the brothers, Nicky and Micheal, who are set apart early on as being independent and self-governing to an extreme. They also end up on opposite sides of the coming war, though ultimately they share the same fate.

Sinclair was one of the early modernist writers and coined the term stream of consciousness. It’s easy to see the author as the precursor to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group to come. Her prose exemplifies the individualism, symbolism and imagery of classic modernist writing. That said, the book drags at times and is too pre-occupied with its discussion of art and feeling to always make sense. It is at times wonderfully moving but not often enough to make up for what it lacks in coherence.

[Mary Grace McGeehan · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started my project of reading books, magazines, and the news as if I were living in 1918 (myyearin1918.com), "The Tree of Heaven" was the big book everyone was talking about--the North American Review's February 1918 book of the month, rave review in The New Republic, etc. It's strange, then, to see that it has more or less disappeared--while some call it a classic, it's not available except by print-on-demand. The book takes us through two decades, from the end of the nineteenth century to mid-WWI, in the life of the Harrison family: doting parents Frances and Anthony, sensitive Michael, pragmatic, big-hearted Nicky, idealistic Dorothy (not doted on as fondly as the boys), and forgettable younger son John. There's also Anthony's scandalous sister-in-law Vera and Ronny, her daughter from an adulterous affair, whom Michael and Nicky are in love with even though she is theoretically their cousin. There's suffrage, which the book treats as self-indulgent even though Sinclair (real name Mary Amelia St. Clair) was a suffragist herself, and modernism, and, of course, the war. It's a compelling story with some vivid characters, particularly Nicky, but in the end it doesn't entirely come to life. Still, it's a fascinating snapshot of upper-class England in mid-war, and Sinclair was paving the way for better modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf. In spite of its flaws, it deserves a wider readership.

[A J HOOPER · Rating 3 out of 5]

Family story of the Harrisons that leads up to and includes the First World War. The somewhat tricky development of the children culminates in two out of three of the sons being killed with a third just setting off to war at the end of the novel. Particularly interesting is the daughter Dorothy's involvement in the suffragette movement, which is very thinly disguised as the real thing. Foster daughter Veronica has an almost saintly presence and seems to be everything to everyman. And the mother Frances is described as ultra absorbed in her children's lives but somehow never quite tuning in to them. I thought this particularly accurate in the sense that as a mother one is rarely on quite the same page as one's children however much you want to be.
The final part of the book is very much taken up with the war and while not wanting to undermine the horror of it, goes on a bit too long. It is certainly unusual in the horrors it depicts, Is I suspect very different to other contemporary novels, and important and valuable for being so
But May Sinclair's book was published before the war had ended so perhaps its just realism that has it ending with yet another Harrison son going off as cannon fodder.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ten stories of romance inflected with various degrees of the supernatural, connected weakly together in a framing scene at the start by the oblique prophesies of a departing mystic to his baffled friends.

Across the tales, lovers are parted or united via disguise, memory loss, ghostly intermediaries, reincarnation, astral projection and death. As with all such romances, things creak a little here and there, but generally this is a well written collection, not devoid of humour either.

Of the more amusing stories I liked 'The Tree of Dreams' best, where a fanciful millionaire who owns a run-down housing complex decides to stay there incognito as a tenant for a while, finding an abusive janitor, faulty stoves, a collapsing roof, but then something far more satisfying.

Of the more sombre stories, I particularly liked 'The Case of Mr. Helmer', where a sculptor learns the dreadful and magnificent meaning behind his own masterpiece when he encounters a mysterious lady in black.

'The Swastika' is worth a quick mention too, in which a rich uncle, who never appears, seems genuinely to have a working crystal ball with which he can keep an eye on the stuttering romances of his nephew.

[L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

The book chronicles the life and changing times of an upper class English family and all the skeletons in their closet. The timeline is sort of sandwiched between the Boer War and World War One. It starts off kind of odd but then... well, it just continues to be odd. I didn't care of Sinclair's style of writing. The word "funk" is used at least 38 times. The history of Studio 54 didn't use the word funk as much. (Yes, I know it was a different meaning but still, some sentences used it two or three times. There was no need for that.)

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This family saga dipped just a little in the section about suffragism - maybe because the women involved were such unpleasant characters - but apart from that it's a gripping story of a family and their interaction with the world around them. And since it was written in 1917, of course the worst happens to the young men. I loved Nicky so much....

[Susan Kavanagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kudos to the British Library Women Writers for republishing this interesting book about a family whose children grow up in the years before and during World War I. I am partial to books written about the effect of war on families. May Sinclair wrote the book in 1917 before the war ended. I really enjoyed reading about the only daughter's involvement in the suffragette movement.

[Muaz Jalil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again a good one from British Library Women Writer Series. Characters are well developed and realistic. Great War emerges near middle or last third of the book. I also liked the afterword by Simon Thomas, clarified some of questions I had about the narrative.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,75/5

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can only give this 2.5 stars. I would not recommend this as an introduction to reading May Sinclair’s works. I would recommend rather ‘The Life and Death of Harriett Frean’, ‘Three Sisters’, or ‘Mary Olivier’.

This was too long. Some of it was way too esoteric. Some of the conversations between people went on interminably, and I was having trouble keeping track of who was saying what.

One strength was the overview it provides us who are living in 2023 on what it was like living in England in the middle of World War One, when many of the young sons (and older sons) of England were dying in hideous numbers (and that occurred in all countries engaged in the conflict on both sides). May Sinclair when writing/ending this book had no idea how the war was going to end or when it was going to end. So that aspect of the book was enlightening to me. Also interesting to me was the women’s suffrage movement.

This book was the first volume re-issued by the British Library’s Women Writer Series. I am sure if May Sinclair was aware of that, she would be honored and happy for that distinction. She is a forgotten author, one of a multitude I know...so I applaud the publishing houses that re-issue books that have long been forgotten that in one way or another should not be forgotten. I’ve enjoyed the majority of books in this series, and also in the Virago Modern Classics editions.

The story line of the book is taken from its back cover (British Library’s Women Writer Series edition):
• Published in 1917 before women achieved the right to vote and victory in the First World War was far from assured, ‘The Tree of Heaven’ tells the intertwining stories of Dorothea Harrison and her three brothers as their lives are overtaken by the outbreak of hostilities. As the old certainties of the previous century disintegrate, Dorothea takes up the cause of women’s suffrage and joins the Women Service Corps as Nicky, Michael, and John go off, one by one, to the trenches.

Note:
• ‘British Library Women Writers’ is a series of novels written by forgotten women writers. (These women are not the Jane Austens.) Each cover features a silhouette of the past author cut out of a pattern that takes inspiration from the era of the book. The ~15 book re-issued to date are from the decades of 1910-1950.

Reviews (much more enthusiastic than I):
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2020/...
• https://www.stuckinabook.com/british-... (written by Simon Thomas who wrote the Afterword, and is Series Consultant for the British Women Writer’s Series)
• https://www.holdsuponhappiness.com/in...

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was skilled and never boring, and at times it was witty/humorous, but, despite the suppoed feminism of the author, I felt in this story that it never went far enough, sometimes capitulating, sometimes making fun of suffrage or looking down upon it with derision/mockery. Also, there were other aspects of its politics that I just could not overall agree with. I'm not sure what exactly Sinclair was trying to say about war, whether she was espousing it or the opposite, but I was sad when Michael gave in and enlisted, somehow suddenly seeing how beautiful and noble it was, as I am someone who cannot support such a thing. The personalities of the characters were vivid and well written, but the themes/morals/meanings of the book at many times ticked me off or rubbed me the wrong way - such as when Frank died, and Dorothy kept lamenting about how she had wasted all those years with her "silly suffrage" when she could have been spending them married to Frank, instead of having kept her principles and not married him due to his anti-suffragist stance and, frankly, misogyny. I thought that was utterly ridiculous, and it infuriated me. There are other points like that in this story.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1917.
This has been re-published by the British Library Women Writers Series which is a curated collection of novels by female authors who enjoyed broad, popular appeal in their day.
May Sinclair (1863 - 1946) was a popular British writer and an active suffragist. She published novels, philosophy, criticism, poetry and biography as well as her 1912 pro-suffrage pamphlet "Feminism".
She has been dubbed "the readable modernist".
This tells the interweaving stories of Dorothea Harrison and her three brothers as their lives are overtaken by the outbreak of the First World War. As the certainties of the previous century disintegrate Dorothea takes up the cause of Women's suffrage and her brothers go to the trenches.
There is a very good Afterword by Simon Thomas who concludes that "As it is The Tree of Heaven is an excellent snapshot of the views and experiences of a representative family in the face of great uncertainty".

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. Perhaps it's unfair to expect that a novel published in 1917, before the end of WWI, does not have a complete perspective on that war. The book seems to glorify the experience battle, as expressed in the letters home of two central male characters who are fighting in the thick of it. Still, this novel has a lot to recommend it. Under the metaphor of a 'vortex,' it ties together so many aspects of life in the 1910s, including school life; the fight for women's suffrage and, of course, attitudes to the war.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A look at one British family, living in Hampstead, as they navigate the issues that present from 1895 through the First World War. Anthony and Frances' children, Michael, Nicky, Dorothea and John, plus several extended family members, face a country going to and then at war, suffrage, artistic revolt, labor strikes, sexual liberation and pacifism. Every one of these characters is brilliantly drawn and garners much sympathy. This is an intense and moving story but also one told with love and care and compassion. It left me with much to contemplate but also with the feeling that I had just read a really good book.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a painful inevitability in this novel as it inexorably leads to the cataclysm of the first world war. Thanks are once again due to the British Library for publishing this forgotten classic. Written in 1917 the outcome of the womens' suffrage movement and the war were yet unknown and the novel has all the tension of uncertainty as a result. This book deserves to be better known than it is and hopefully this edition will go some way to achieving that.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A multi-generational story set in England from the beginning of the Boer War until the middle of the Great War (World War I), a bestseller of its time (circa 1917) - to me it seems like it must have been positively scandalous at the time (affairs, divorces, etc.). It is actually quite well written and held my attention quite well. I found the ending a little abrupt and unsatisfactory, but then, the lack of satisfactory ending is sort of the point - life just keeps going on . . .

[Bonnie]

Interestingly written, but I thought it was going to be more cozy. It was not cozy at all. It was written during WW1, and the 3rd part of it was set during WWI, and I found it depressing.