Anne Severn and the Fieldings

Anne Severn arrives at the Fielding house as a motherless child, and from that first moment, something shifts in the family that will last a lifetime. She is adopted not just into their home but into the complicated web of love and longing that binds her to the three Fielding brothers: David, John, and Ralph. They grow up together, close enough to know each other's silences, and the reader watches the quiet devastation unfold as all three brothers fall hopelessly in love with the girl who belongs to all of them and none. Then the war comes. World War I tears through their world with the kind of brutality that only real history can deliver, and the brothers return from the front broken in ways that novelists of the era rarely dared to depict. Anne herself goes to the war as an ambulance driver, and it is here that May Sinclair makes her bizarre, brilliant appearance as a character: a "queer little middle-aged lady" who has come to drive ambulances at the front. The author inserting herself into her own novel, watching her own creation drive past in an ambulance, is either a postmodern joke or an act of desperate intimacy with her characters. Perhaps both. This is not the romance you expect. It is sharper, sadder, and more honest than that.