Tasker Jevons: The Real Story

Written by May Sinclair

Narrated by Expatriate

In this May Sinclair wartime masterpiece, dashing newsman Walter Furnival is an absurdly good catch: handsome, successful, athletic, intelligent, an upstanding epitome of manhood and rectitude. Tasker Jevons is a puny, preposterous, impossible-looking, bombastic sports writer, without one single redeeming social grace. Imagine the jealous mortification of Furny when his enchanting young typist and love interest Viola Thesiger chooses the clownish Jevons as a lover, seeing in him a remarkable inner beauty not evident to anyone but her and (as he grudgingly but magnanimously admits) the long-suffering and devoted Furnival. But despite the title, the central character of this extraordinary novel is not the redoubtable Jevons but the rebellious feminist Viola, determined against all odds not only to revolt against every enslaving conformity of her upbringing, but also to burn all her boats behind her, ruthlessly leaving herself no possibility of a return to the soporific decorum of her cloistered family and past. This extraordinary menage, however, is broken apart by the irruption of the Great War into their lives. ( Expatriate)

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

May Sinclair

Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863-1946) was a British writer and suffragist who wrote under the pseudonym of May Sinclair. Both a successful writer and important literary critic, Sinclair supported herself and her mother. She was a prominent critic of modernist poetry and prose, and has been credited for being the first to use “stream of consciousness” in a literary context. Sinclair was very socially active, advocating for scientific advancements and participating in suffrage movements. She often included feminist themes in her work, encouraging discussion on the social disadvantages forced on women. After her death in 1946, Sinclair left behind a legacy of innovative literary critiques, impactful activism, and a vast literary canon.