Anne Severn and the Fieldings

by May Sinclair

"Anne Severn and the Fieldings" by May Sinclair. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Genres: Fiction

320 pages, Nook

First published January 1, 1922

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

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I liked the other books I have read by her (The Three Sisters, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, Mary Olivier: A Life, History of Anthony Waring) better than this one. I feel that she took too long to tell her story. The story line wasn’t that bad...it followed the life of Anne Severn, from when she was just a child and had lost her mother to illness to when she was in her 30s, and her relationship with the family she lived with (they were sort of like neighbors), the Fieldings. That consisted of Adeline Fielding and her husband, Robert, and their three sons, Eliot, Jerrold, and Colin.

The author of this book, May Sinclair, had to take care of some or all of her 5 older brothers, four of them who had heart disease, and there’s similarities to what she had to do in real life and what her main protagonist in this novel had to do, Anne Severn. She felt compelled to take care of one of the Fielding brothers, Colin, who suffered from shell shock from fighting in the tranches in WWI. Another brother, Jerrold, who she had loved since early childhood, got the wrong impression that she was not only taking care of Colin but sleeping with him. Jerrold had always loved Anne and when he came to believe that she loved his younger brother Colin, he shortly thereafter proposes marriage to a woman, Maisie, who he knew but did not love. What a dumb ass (Jerrold, not Maisie)! Sometime after that, he and Anne can’t hold back their mutual desire for one another, and end up in a secret sexual liaison for several months. They both feel terrible that they are sleeping with each other behind Maisie’s back, but Anne has never met Maisie and only hears from Jerrold that it’s OK they are sleeping with each other because Maisie is “cold” (i.e., frigid). Well, that’s not true. It’s because of a neurosis that Maisie harbors...and the reasoning for that is too frigging convoluted for this review. Finally, Anne meets Maisie and Maisie is super-affectionate and nice to Anne which makes Anne feel super-guilty (she is sleeping with Maisie’s husband). Oh yeah, and I forgot to say that another brother, Eliot, who is a bacteriologist and has found the cure for trench fever (a disease called by lice... from 1915 to 1918 between one-fifth and one-third of all British troops reported ill had trench fever), is also in love with Anne. Oh yes, and I forget to say that Adeline, guardian to Anne (Anne calls her Aunt) and the mother of Jerrold, Eliot, and Colin, tells Maisie that she better keep an eye out for Anne because Anne’s in love with her husband, Jerrold. What an a++hole (Adeline not Maisie) ...sorry but throughout a good part of the book that’s what she is. Super-selfish. And Anne’s father.... he takes a job halfway around the world and lets other people raise Anne. Not what I would call a doting father.

I am starting to notice some similarities in her books.
• In the book ‘Mary Olivier: A Life’, Mary who is unmarried eventually sleeps with her lover, and in this book, Anne sleeps with her lover, a married man.
• Sinclair published a book in 1924 — History of Anthony Waring —which involved a character using amyl nitrate because he had angina and in fact his wife was too late in getting it during his last attack and he died. So, in this book, published two years earlier, Maisie has been diagnosed as having false angina and she keeps amyl nitrate around just in case, but really it is not her heart that is troubling here...it’s a neurosis.

Note:
• In the 1930s, it was thought that May Sinclair owned a Rolls Royce, and that she had her chauffeur drive it at high speeds because, according to her doctor, the shaking of a speeding car made her less aware of the tremor caused by her Parkinson’s disease. For pics of the car (it’s a beauty!!), see: https://maysinclairsociety.com/catego...

Reviews:
• https://www.stuckinabook.com/anne-sev...
• https://296.library.nashville.org/Hoo...

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third novel by May Sinclair that I've read. The first, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean I admired (enjoyed is not quite the right word) for its hauntingly spare unsentimental story. The second, Mary Olivier: A Life, despite being another life story of a female heroine, was quite different: a very long book, perhaps too long, sometimes bewildering (it's written in a "stream of consciousness" style, a phrase that Sinclair herself coined), yet I found it immensely rich and rewarding. Both of them impressed me in their different ways, so I was quite pleased to find a handsome old copy of Anne Severn and the Fieldings (published in 1922, the same year as Harriett Frean) in an antique mall. The books one finds in such places are so rarely actual "antiques," finding it there had a special charm.

I expected good things from it, and in the opening chapters wasn't disappointed. After her mother's death sometime in the early 1900s, young Anne Severn, who's about ten at the start, spends part of every year at the home of family friends, the charismatic and well to-to-do Fieldings, who live in a comfortable manor, where the kindly father farms his extensive lands. There are three sons, scientifically-minded Elliot, who wishes to become a doctor, Jerrold, Anne's closest in age and her best companion, and lastly Colin, who is much younger than the others, and is sensitive and musical. Anne, grieving, but with her quiet personality of deep strength nonetheless shining through, develops a strong bond with each of them. The book will take the relationships among the four young people through adolescence, the Great War and its aftermath. However, what struck me most in the early chapters was the wonderfully awful character of the boys' mother, Adeline. She's a masterful depiction of narcissism: beautiful, charming and utterly selfish. Her primary concern upon Anne's arrival is that Anne, who's devastated by the loss of her mother, doesn't love her, Adeline, and shrinks away from her caresses. I thought that the main point was going to be about how the lives of all four children were doomed to be warped by this monstrous person, and to some extent this is the case, but at some point midway Adeline gets mostly sidelined. The same is true of another character Queenie, who marries one of the brothers, and who, like Adeline, is so awful she's fun to read about. Queenie and Anne end up serving as ambulance drivers in Belgium together during the war, and the brief chapter of letters (in which Anne describes how every time Anne or any of the other women serving near the front is exposed to shelling, Queenie is full of jealous rage because SHE wants to be the only one who braves danger!) might have been my favorite part of the book.

However, in the second half of the novel, Sinclair's focus narrows on Anne's relationship with the three brothers, especially Colin and Jerrold, and the pages and pages of love triangle angst (or is it a love square or some even larger polygon? Fans of Flambards will understand why that series came to mind) I found tedious and over-analysed. And the ending annoyed me I had been hoping the Jerrold, who is really quite a boring character, would be revealed to be weak -- as indeed he was, in leaving Anne just because she was helpful at his father's deathbed -- and Anne would find happiness elsewhere. Also Jerrold's wif Maisy's reaction at the revelation of the affair between the two was maddening. Anne, not, in my opinion, a successful creation, is so perfect that everybody who knows her, even poor wronged Maisy, loves her so much, they just want her to be happy, and Maisy sees how Perfect and Pure Anne and Jerrold's love is, and is only too glad to step aside and return to her parents, her own life more or less wrecked. . May Sinclair was an early exponent of the then budding field of psychiatry, and there's some mildly interesting psychological stuff (which I'm not sure would stand up to present day medical scrutiny) in how it all plays out, but generally I found the second half of the book irritating.

Lastly, from such a fine writer, I found the overuse of the word "adorable" really surprising. It's as though she's just discovered it.

Anyway, this is the weakest of the three May Sinclair's I've read, but that said, I'll try another should one fall in my lap.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not at all a useful tome for my thesis, Anne Severn and the Fieldings is still a fascinating and eminently readable novel. Sinclair's writing is wonderful, as are her characters. The only thing which lets this particular tome down is the surprisingly twee ending. Regardless, it is an interesting and historically fascinating novel, which should be read more often than it seems to be.

[Rachel Hyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Dodo Press “forgotten classic” reissue, and I… think I liked it? This 1922 novel full of pastoral England and WWI and an emerging, evolving amorality is not quite a family saga, not quite a romance, and not quite an insightful window into its time and place, but it is a little bit of all those things, and that made it pretty compelling, if not entirely satisfactory.

The Fieldings of the title are a family headed by a kindly gentlemen farmer, and we first meet them when Anna is a child who visits them in their country idyll each summer. She bonds early with the sweet-tempered Jerrold, and the two seem made for each other, but a series of tragedies — many war-related — throw many a rub thrown in the way of true love’s course, as do Jerry’s two brothers, the high-strung Colin and the way-too-good-for-everyone-in-this-book Eliot.

One thing that somewhat astonished me, toward the book’s end, was some pretty blatant sex talk, and even more blatant infidelity, which shouldn’t have shocked me (this was the 1920s!) but totally did. I guess because the earlier part of the book had been bathed in the golden age of Honour and Duty and rolling hills and the feudal spirit, I had been lulled into historical romance mode, but of course, this is a contemporary not-quite-romance, and so consequently far less idealized.

May Sinclair was a best-seller in her day, and with this outing, I can see why. Lyrical prose meets with idyllic scenery meets with scandalbroth and no little salaciousness, plus a pretty fearless depiction of the horrors of PTSD* — these elements could easily make for a best-seller even now.

* That said, the suggestion that only “sensitive” young men would so suffer from the condition is pretty toxic, and sadly persistent.

[Roderick Wolfson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, romantic book. Sinclair has sensitive, psychological insights into her characters. The protagonist, Anne starts this book as a child, thrust into a family of three boys when her mother dies. Her relationships with the three brothers matures in interesting ways over the course of the book. The writing is full of beautiful descriptions of people and their passions.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ending and the cod psychology spoiled this for me. It was all a bit Wings of the Dove and Golden Bowl for my liking, but of course much more intelligible. Sinclair wrote like an angel, her descriptions of places are extraordinarily vivid and of course she was brilliant at creating appalling characters - Adeline is quite dreadful in that Sinclair non-judgemental way. I wouldn't recommend it though until you have read a few others by her.

[Jim Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

May Sinclair was a master at analyzing her characters’ psychology (she was an early follower of Freud). In Anne Severn, she follows a family from the late 1890’s until after WWI. Early on, we see how the characters’ personalities will affect their decisions in later life: Colin is a frightened little boy who needs company to feel secure, Eliot is logical, scientific and insightful, Gerrald avoids conflict and does not like to deal with hard realities. Their mother is a beauty who never outgrows the need to be worshipped. Into this family is thrown their cousin, Ann, whose mother has died. She instantly bonds with the boys and the book follows their relationships. Unfortunately, the book, which starts as a rebuke of the decorum of Victorian family novels--this one is filled with sexual tension and dark, complex impulses, degenerates into a soap opera as each of the boys try to persuade Ann to be their own. I feel like Sinclair’s need for a commercial success interfered with her original intent in this novel and about halfway through nearly every action seems contrived.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a well-deserved four stars. Unfortunately, illness prevents me from writing a review.

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) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★