Mary Amelia St. Clair (May) Sinclair was born 24 August 1863, the child of William and Amelia Hind Sinclair. She was the youngest child and the only daughter among six children. Her father, the owner of a fairly sizeable fleet of small worldwide-transport ships, operated the business from Liverpool offices from 1850 to 1870, when the business failed and he became bankrupt. A heavy drinker, he died of cirrhosis of the liver and chronic nephritis in 1881. Her mother's oppressively harsh dominance of the family and fearful hatred of sexuality and William Sinclair's alcoholism are frankly presented and perceptively analyzed in Sinclair's novels The Helpmate (1907) and Mary Olivier (1919). After the failure of the family business when May was seven, the parents separated. The children and their mother moved constantly from one part of London to another and from one relative's home to another. May Sinclair educated herself from books, except for a few...