Shooting Party-Anton Chekhov

Jane Holland is a genius, the greatest of a group of extraordinary literary friends. She has an intense artistic and intellectual kinship with George Tanqueray, another remarkable novelist. Despite this keen spiritual relationship, both Holland and Tanqueray allow themselves to fall against their wills into more conventional romantic commitments, leading to agonizing crises of heart and mind and art. Another of May Sinclair’s marvelous philosophical novels, this masterpiece explores the great dilemmas of artistic Genius and the obstacles posed to it by Love, by philistine society, by the two-faced allure of popularity, by human jealousy, by the conventions of marriage and family. More deeply, Sinclair here lays bare the excruciating choices required particularly of a woman genius, and the double standards applied to her in a society that allowed so much indulgence to a man considered to have such artistic gifts. Demonic or angelic, curse or blessing, affliction or joy, the involuntary gifting of Genius sets any human being apart from the uncomprehending and judgmental society in which she must live, a condition delineated in “The Creators” with delicate subtlety and fierce passion. ( Expatriate)