The Fieldings are a family that tries to love her, tries to help her forget her sorrows -- and they try to take care of her. Too many things remind Anne of her dead mother, however, and so she has a difficult time returning the affections of the matriarch. When she finally begins to love them, she is sent off again for school. By the time she returns, she discovers that the family children have grown, as had she. They begin to love each other more than brother and sister. But will they survive the ravages of war to find their happily ever after?
May Sinclair was an active member of the suffragette movement. Her best-known novels include The Three Sisters (based on the Bronte sisters), and Life and Death of Harriet Frean. Anne Severn and the Fieldings is partly based on Sinclair's own experiences during World War I.
Author Biography
May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863 - 1946), 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. From 1896 Sinclair wrote professionally to support herself and her mother, who died in 1901. An active feminist, Sinclair treated a number of themes relating to the position of women and marriage. Her works sold well in the United States. Around 1913, at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London, she became interested in psychoanalytic thought and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization (which included Lady Dorothie Feilding, Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm) that aided wounded Belgian soldiers on the Western Front in Flanders. She was sent home after only a few weeks at the front. Her 1913 novel The Combined Maze, the story of a London clerk and the two women he loves, was highly praised by critics, including George Orwell, while Agatha Christie considered it one of the greatest English novels of its time.
