May Sinclair: Writer inspired by Reeth published in US and Britain

Few people have heard of her, yet she was regarded as best female novelist of her day, both in Britain and America.

She published two dozen novels, poetry, works on philosophy and ideas plus numerous literary reviews and opinion pieces. She chose not to marry and was active in the cause of women’s suffrage and women’s rights. She once said she would “tug and kick” her way out of the restrictive conventions applied to women in her lifetime.

Born in Cheshire in 1886, May lived in Victoria Cottage on Reeth High Row, near the Black Bull, between 1912 and 1918. It was a kind of retreat so she could concentrate on her writing, and it worked, for this was one of her most productive periods as she produced two of her classic novels, Mary Olivier: A Life and The Three Sisters. In the novels, the dale is weaved into her own, complicated life story and emotions to create the plot.

Mary Olivier, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, is probably her best known work, described in her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "a powerful though understated portrait of female disappointment and repression".

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On September 19, Helen Clifford, curator of the Swaledale Museum, is leading a guided walk around Reeth in the footsteps of May as part of this month’s Richmond and Walking and Book Festival.

She stumbled across May’s links to the area by accident. “I became aware of her back in 2010 when I found a 1920s guide book to Swaledale in which she was described as ‘a famous novelist’,” she says. “I was intrigued as had I not heard of her.

Victoria Cottage, on Reeth High Row, where May Sinclair lived. Picture courtesy of Swaledale Museum

“On further research I discovered that she was very famous and influential. She was friends with Thomas Hardy, HG Wells, TS Eliot and Charlotte Mew amongst others.

“She had to write to earn money. Her prolific output is not of a uniformly good standard, but the two novels she wrote in Swaledale are exceptional.”

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Helen believes that the Swaledale landscape was inspirational to May and that “her descriptions are almost photographic – it was a pleasure to match the ‘real’ houses/sites with their mention in the fiction.”

Helen's researches have grown into the walking tour of Reeth which visits the places May uses in her books, tells of her life, and reads relevant passages from her books. In The Footsteps of May Sinclair starts at 1pm at the Swaledale Museum on Tuesday, September 19, and is followed by afternoon tea at the Burgoyne Hotel. Tickets are £20, including the tea, and are available via Richmond Information Centre or booksandboots.org.

The Burgoyne Hotel, Reeth

THE Burgoyne’s involvement in the event is essential because it features in Mary Olivier as “Hill House”, and May describes it as “the long house on the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs". Then she takes her readers inside Hill House, describing it as she found it in the 1910s, with stuffed fish and love birds populating the hall in which she also found “drapes of dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood”.

She calls it Hill House because that was its original name, built in 1783 to dominate the new green. It was a very visible sign that Reeth, as the capital of leadmining, was thriving. The new found prosperity had enabled the village to reorientate itself away from being a humble huddle near the crossing over the River Arkle to a settlement of grand townhouses around the spacious green. Hill House was the grandest of them all.

When May arrived, though, Reeth’s fortunes were in reverse as leadmining died. The dale’s population had plummeted from 1,700 to 580 and many houses were abandoned. Hill House, though, when she knew it, was still occupied by the village’s principle landowner, George Robinson.

He was married to Emma Mangles, of a Richmond family. They didn’t have any children so on their deaths, in 1922, Hill House passed to Emma’s sister, Matilda Burgoyne Johnson. She was newly widowed and had inherited £110,000 (about £4m in today’s values) from her husband whose family had made their fortune in Durham pubs, breweries and coal mines.

Mrs Burgoyne-Johnson breezed forcefully into Hill House, with her butler, cook, housemaids, laundrymaids, gardener and chauffeur – so many servants that a new wing had to be built onto what she insisted on calling Burgoyne House – and with a hyphen appearing out-of-nowhere in her surname. She was a staunch Tory and changed the political complexion of the previously Liberal dale.

During the Second World War, Burgoyne House was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence and soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk marched out from the railhead at Darlington to be stationed there.

After the war Burgoyne House became a hotel and, as the D&S Times restaurant reviewer Malcolm Warne said in 2018, it is “unquestionably the most imposing building in the village, queen of all she surveys below her and beyond in wider Swaledale”.