Mary Olivier: A Life (New York Review Books Classics)

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First published in 1919, Mary Olivier is one of May Sinclair's best-remembered novels. The youngest of four children and the only girl in her Victorian family, Mary Olivier faces formidable barriers: she will not be educated as her brothers, nor will she be afforded their freedoms. Held emotionally hostage to a calculating mother, Mary retreats into her imagination and into books. Rejecting Victorian formulas, she becomes a published poet and refuses to marry a succession of suitors. Yet she remains a dutiful daughter. Hers is a timeless story in which obligation and liberty, acquiescence and rebellion coexist in a fully realized, ultimately modern woman.


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Jenny didn't believe that a big girl, nine next birthday, could really be afraid of funerals. She thought you were only trying to be tiresome. She said you could stop thinking about funerals well enough when you wanted. You did forget sometimes when nice things happened; when you went to see Mrs. Farmer's baby undressed, and when Isabel Batty came to tea. Isabel was almost a baby. It felt nice to lift her and curl up her stiff, barley-sugar hair and sponge her weak, pink silk hands. And there were things that you could do.


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"Originally published alongside Ulysses in the pages of the legendary Little Review, Mary Olivier: A Life is an account of the ties between daughter and mother, a book of transfixing images and troubling moral intelligence that confronts the exigencies and ambiguities of freedom and responsibility with empathy and power. May Sinclair's finest novel stands comparison with the work of Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, and the young Virginia Woolf." As a child, Mary Olivier's dreamy disposition and fierce intelligence set her apart from her Victorian family, especially her mother, "Little Mamma," whose dazzling looks cannot hide her meager love for her only daughter. Mary grows up in a world of her own, a solitude that leaves her free to explore her deepest passions, for literature and philosophy, for the austere beauties of England's north country, even as she continues to attend to her family. But in time the independence Mary values - at, almost any cost - threatens to become a form of captivity itself.


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