The Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair

This is a curious book, published in 1922, by a novelist I hadn’t read before and which I would probably never have bothered with if it hadn’t been in one of those Eternal Masterpieces of Literature which you can clog your Kindle up with for a few coppers. Jonathan Coe went as far as to describe it as a “small, perfect gem of a book.” Far be it from me to disagree, but I found it quite irritating and profoundly sad.

You can’t go wrong by following Philip Larkin’s profound advice in This Be The Verse; “they fuck you up, your mum and dad/ they may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you./ But they were fucked up in their turn/ by fools in old-style hats and coats,/…Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ and don’t have kids yourself.” If you want a synopsis of Sinclair’s novel, that’s pretty much it.

As it says on the tin, the novel follows the life and times of Harriett Frean, a woman who is raised to respect the ideals of Victorian life by her parents and to behave beautifully. She falls in love with her best friend’s fiancé and instead of following her heart, which might have made for a more interesting story, she makes the noblest of all sacrifices and gives up her beau.

Harriett feels morally superior after her sacrifice and takes a perverse pleasure from her decision but all she is doing is condemning her childhood friend and her lover to a loveless marriage. She does nothing with her life, living in the claustrophobic family home. Her father, who is supposedly a whizz on the stock exchange, loses his money and, it later transpires, the monies of others. He is not the paragon of virtue that Harriett thought.

Indeed, as the book progresses and Harriett gets older, losing her parents along the way, she becomes more and more reclusive. What social life she had, slowly recedes into the distance and she takes comfort of a boring routine of meals, reading, sewing and the odd visit out to friends with she seems to have increasingly less in common with and less time for. In the end she dies, having accomplished nothing tangible, save for wrecking some lives along the way, and she may as well not have existed. At least she didn’t have any kids.

Sinclair’s style is simple with the occasional flash of wit but I found it hard to make sense of what it was all really about. Is it a fierce feminist polemic against the tyranny that the patriarchical society imposed (and, perhaps, still imposes) on womenfolk? Or is it a tale of a timid woman who is afraid of her own shadow and, consequently, wastes her own life and destroys the lives of those around her? You pays your money and takes your choice but I lean towards the latter interpretation.

Either way, my advice is; read Philip Larkin’s poem, instead. It’s shorter!