Biography

Megan Feulner is a writer and literary researcher based in Boston. She holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies and is currently developing a book-length project on the writer May Sinclair. Her work is concerned with literary and intellectual lives, female interiority, and the unstable afterlives of women writers—the ways reputations are made, lost, and recovered.

May Sinclair

I am developing a book-length project on May Sinclair (1863–1946), the English novelist, poet, critic, suffragist, and philosopher whose work occupied a strange and consequential position at the threshold of literary modernism.

Once a widely read novelist and an influential presence in early twentieth-century literary culture, Sinclair has become curiously difficult to place. Her fiction moves between the Victorian world she inherited and the modernist one she helped articulate, returning insistently to female consciousness, intellectual freedom, desire, family, solitude, and the struggle to make a life outside prescribed forms.

My project begins with that disappearance: how a writer so deeply engaged with the emergence of modern psychological fiction came to occupy the margins of its history. I am particularly interested in Sinclair’s representations of female interiority and self-creation, and in the relationship between her fiction, feminism, philosophy, and the changing literary culture around her.