Welcome to Litsy!

Originally published alongside Ulysses in the pages of the legendary Little Review, Mary Olivier: A Life is an intimate, lacerating account of the ties between daughter and mother, a book of transfixing images and troubling moral intelligence that confronts the exigencies and ambiguities of freedom and responsibility with empathy and power. May Sinclair�s finest novel stands comparison with the work of Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, and the young Virginia Woolf. As a child, Mary Olivier�s dreamy disposition and fierce intelligence set her apart from her Victorian family, especially her mother, �Little Mamma,� whose dazzling looks cannot hide her meager love for her only daughter. Mary grows up in a world of her own, a solitude that leaves her free to explore her deepest passions, for literature and philosophy, for the austere beauties of England�s north country, even as she continues to attend to her family. But in time the independence Mary values�at almost any cost�threatens to become a form of captivity itself