As many of you will be aware, the British Library have recently launched their Women Writers series, the first three titles are now available with more due out later in the year. Each of these new, beautifully designed editions come with an afterword written by Simon of Stuckinabook. The Tree of Heaven is a novel that has been sadly out of print for a very long time, May Sinclair is probably best known for her novel The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, one of three Sinclair novels that were re-issued by Virago in the 1980s.
The novel depicts the lives of a reasonably ordinary middle class family; the Harrisons, beginning in the late nineteenth century. As the novel opens Frances Harrison is resting beneath the tree she insists on calling the tree of heaven – but is identified as rally being just an ash tree. She is expecting her husband Anthony home for tea soon. It’s a peaceful little domestic scene. The tree referred to throughout the novel becomes something of a symbol of something positive. Frances is surrounded by her children; Dorothy (sometimes Dorothea) Michael, Nicky and John. The elder three children are to go to a party, and straight away we start to see something of the different personalities of these children whose best years will be framed by the First World War. Nicky, whose first party it is, excited full of life and enthusiasm, Michael suddenly deciding not to go, wanting to remain at home and do his own thing.
The family represent something of the new non-Victorian age that was almost upon them, while Frances does seem to favour her boy children over her daughter, there is a feeling of kindness and support in this family. Contrasted with the Harrisons are other relatives, spinster aunts, a very disreputable uncle, the wife of whom eventually leaves him, sends her daughter Veronica to live with the Harrisons and sets up home with another man out of wedlock.
The disreputable uncle had served in the Boer war, and war is unsurprisingly a major theme of the novel. The Harrison boys grow up before the 1910s, complete their education and begin the make their way in the world in the years before the Great War. They each have their own concerns, Michael, so often out of step with those around him, taking up the cause of Irish nationalism – much to his family’s bemusement. Nicky, becoming romantically entangled with the wrong woman, while assisting with work on a machine of mechanical warfare. John, just a few years behind his brothers, destined to work alongside his father. Dorothy we understand early on is a forward looking, intelligent young woman very much of the new age, she studied economics at Newnham, back at home her concerns have turned toward the women’s suffrage movement.
Dorothy’s involvement in the suffrage movement is a key theme in the novel, she is committed to her independence, though like other young women of the period lives at home. She even holds a meeting here while her parents are entertaining guests elsewhere in the house. She joins the (fictional) Women’s Franchise Movement, immediately certain the cause the only right one, though Dorothy refuses to indulge in what she calls ‘blind unquestioning obedience.’ Still, she is a passionate supporter, despite knowing the man she cares for abhors all suffragette activities.
“For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and the hardness of her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these women of the Union…”
Later, having spent time in prison – an experience she in no way regrets – Dorothy seems somewhat disillusioned by some of the antics of other suffragettes, working instead for the Social Reform Union. In Dorothy, we see something of May Sinclair’s own attitude to the suffrage movement.
When war finally comes, it is the man who Dorothy loves who leaves first, Michael declares himself against the whole thing, and says he won’t go. His position, as time goes on, both awkward and worrying for his family. Nicky enlists with his typical enthusiasm – his father, despite his age tries and is rejected and younger brother John rejected because of a heart murmur, still Michael says, not yet.
“With the exception of Michael and old Mrs Fleming, Anthony’s entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained and ready when the moment of summons came. Strong young girls hustled for the best places at ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with those remorseless ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet, they went on contending, sustained by their extraordinary illusion.”
The war will take its toll on this family – I’ll say no more than that – in different ways, but it is a poignant depiction of a family living through tumultuous times.
First published in 1917, May Sinclair could not have known when she was writing what the outcome of the war would be. Neither would she have known that the first women would be allowed the vote in 1918 – all women a decade later. The world we encounter here is one on the brink of change, where the future is still an uncertainty. A thoroughly enjoyable, thought provoking novel, The Tree of Heaven weaves together several major themes, in the story of a family we can’t help but care deeply about. I am so very glad it has been brought back for modern readers to enjoy.
