Uncanny Stories

"Uncanny Stories" by May Sinclair is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The book delves into themes of love, memory, and the supernatural, exploring the complexities of human emotions and encounters with the unknown. Each story features characters grappling with their past and the echoes of lost love, particularly the protagonist Harriott Leigh, whose experiences with different men unveil the haunting nature of her memories and relationships. The opening of "Uncanny Stories" introduces Harriott Leigh, who is caught in a poignant moment of farewell with her love, George Waring, before he departs on a naval mission. Their exchange reveals a deep bond intertwined with youthful hopes and the bitter realities of parental disapproval. Despite her promise to wait for him, tragedy strikes when George's ship sinks, leading Harriott to spiral into despair. As time passes, we glimpse Harriott's struggle to reconcile her past loves with her present life, particularly as she confronts new relationships and the omnipresent shadow of George. This opening sets the stage for a narrative that intertwines the threads of memory and the spectral reverberations of unresolved emotions, inviting readers into a world where the past never truly fades away. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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. She once dressed up as a demure, rebel Jane Austen for a suffrage fundraising event. 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 (1915–1967), in The Egoist, April 1918.