Mary Olivier

The life of an Englishwoman from infancy to middle age, told from inside her head as it happens: a Yorkshire childhood, brothers who are given everything, a mother who must be looked after, and a mind that keeps escaping into German philosophy. Sinclair translated the idealists to keep her mother, campaigned for the vote, and went to Belgium with an ambulance corps at fifty-one; this 1919 novel is one of the first in English written wholly in stream of consciousness — she was the first to apply the phrase to fiction.