À l’image des cas exposés par Freud, les romans de May Sinclair sont des objets déconcertants. Souvent qualifiés de textes hybrides qui se tiendraient à mi-chemin entre deux époques (celle des victoriens et le modernisme), ils se distinguent également par l’importance accordée aux discours théoriques. Esprit curieux au parcours singulier, May Sinclair est en effet également une essayiste prolifique, dont les publications sur le vote féminin et la condition des femmes, les articles de psychologie et de psychanalyse (issus de son implication auprès de la pionnière Medico-Psychological Clinic), les critiques littéraires ou les développements sur le néo-idéalisme semblent être en dialogue constant avec ses écrits de fiction. Ceux-ci ne sont jamais pour autant des romans à thèses. Bien au contraire, la prose sinclairienne s’attache systématiquement à remettre en question le cadre de référence, à prolonger le questionnement ou à affiner l’analyse, et propose ainsi un contrepoint intéressant aux modèles woolfiens de représentation du féminin. Afin de saisir ce qui fonde la démarche sinclairienne et de la situer dans son contexte intellectuel et artistique immédiat, ce travail propose une étude du dialogue intertextuel transdisciplinaire entre les différents travaux d’écriture Sinclair. Il s’agit plus précisément de montrer comment la pensée par cas et la pratique de l’étude de cas, telle qu’elle était pratiquée par Freud au tournant du XXe siècle, vient influencer la fiction sinclairienne, placée sous le signe d’une négociation singulière entre l’énigme et le modèle, entre l’abstrait et l’inconnu. / May Sinclair’s novels, like Freud’s case narratives in their times, rely on singularity. If their conflicting Victorian and modernist dynamics are often underlined, another type of structural hybridity is also perceptible, namely the important role played by theoretical discourses. May Sinclair is indeed a prolific essayist, whose papers on femininity and women Suffrage, on psychology and psychoanalysis (based on her involvement with the Medico-Psychological Clinic), and on her neo-idealist philosophy, as well as her many literary reviews, are ingrained in her fiction, which still manages to stay away from any form of didacticism. Indeed, Sinclair’s fiction seems to constantly try and challenge its theoretical framework and raises new issues on the representations of feminine consciousness. It thus provides us with an interesting counterpoint to Woolf’s. In order to highlight the specific dynamics of Sinclair’s approach to fiction and to situate Sinclair’s novels within their intellectual and artistic context, this thesis explores the transdisciplinary, intertextual dialogue between Sinclair’s fiction and non-fiction. More precisely, this work aims at showing how the psychoanalytical case-based reasoning method initiated by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century plays a central role in Sinclair’s writings, which appears as a complex negotiation between enigma and model, or between the abstract and the unknown.

This thesis reconsiders in detail the connections between a selection of innovative female modernist writers who experimented variously with stream-of-consciousness techniques, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. It describes in this context the impact of the philosophy and thoughts of both William James and Henri Bergson upon these women writers’ literary work. It also argues for a fundamental revision of existing understandings of this interconnection by considering the feminist context of such work and recognising that the work of these four female writers in effect incorporates a ‘gendered’ reading of James and Bergson (encountered both directly and indirectly through the cultural and intellectual zeitgeist). In establishing a feminist perspective as key elements of their aesthetic the thesis explores the vital influence of existing tradition of female autobiography upon their reception and usage of both James and Bergson. The latter’s impact on such women writers were so distinctive and powerful as the work of these philosophers seemed to speak directly to contemporary feminist concerns and in that context to represent a way of thinking about society and culture. This echoes and has parallels with existing attempts at revisions of patriarchal society and creating new spaces for female independence. In the above context the thesis reviews existing research on the impact of James and Bergson on these four writers and offers new insights into how each of them made use of these two seminal thinkers by analysing the relationship between theories, selected literary and philosophical texts. Stream-of-consciousness ought to be seen as a distinctive, specific tradition connected with feminist concerns and as a way of writing the inner and hidden self, rather than just a narrow formal feature of literary texts; it offers women a continuing, creative exploration of its possibilities as fictional practice. The female modernists included in this account represent the celebrated: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, together with writers largely and unjustly forgotten in subsequent periods: Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair. However, the thesis demonstrates that such female modernist writers gained much from being part of a range of informal networks, being almost within a tradition in which they learnt, borrowed and reacted to each other; an interconnection that requires new critical recognition.