Virginia Woolf did not think much of May Sinclair. When she had tea with her in 1909, she wrote to Lady Robert Cecil that Sinclair was a ‘woman of obtrusive, and medicinal morality’ with ‘little round eyes bright as steel’ (Woolf 1976: 390). But Woolf was famously catty about writers with whom she felt a sense of rivalry, and it was Sinclair, not Woolf, who was the first of the pair to publish an experimental, streamof- consciousness novel (Mary Olivier: A Life, in 1919). The two writers had more in common than Woolf would care to admit. Both were interested in reproducing the texture of the inner world; both were preoccupied with the psychology of women; and both sought to explore the process and experience of memory: the ‘present sliding over the depths of the past’, as Woolf would put it years later in her memoir (Woolf 1985: 98). In 1917, Sinclair imagined what it might be like if we had no psyche to select and shape what we remember:

Sinclair suggests that not the brain but the psyche brings order to this potential chaos: ‘the psyche uses the brain, and the memories which have become the habits of its body and its brain, as its machine, and its vehicle; and […] the secret of its remembering and forgetting is its own’ (Sinclair 1917: 105). Sinclair favoured the idea that ‘psychical disposition’ (Sinclair 1917: 105– 6) working through ‘an act of will’ (Sinclair 1917: 17) could free the consciousness from the burden of the past, but she was not entirely sure that this idea was right. Indeed, she spent much of her career – at least after 1914 – preoccupied with how to manage her relationship to the past.