Hearing Place: Sinclair’s Acoustic Imagination

Description

The bells rang out; the bells of Ilford, the bells of Barkingside, and far beyond the flats and the cemetery there would be Bow bells, and beyond that the bells of the City of London. They clanged together and she trembled. The sounds closed over her; they left off and began again, not very loud, but tight—tight, crushing her heart, crushing tears out of her eyelids. When the bells stopped there was a faint whirring sound. That was the Old Year, that was eighteen sixty-nine, going out by itself in the dark, going away over the fields.

May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, p. 44


What kind of spatial configuration is produced when the bells sound across an expanding spatial scope? How might the tightening pressure of their clangour, ‘crushing her heart’, suggest an affective atmosphere? If the faint whirring that follows the bells marks the Old Year’s departure, could this be understood as a temporal signal which folds time into the soundscape itself? How far do passages like these invoke sound as a structuring force in how place is sensed?

This paper asks how May Sinclair’s fiction constructs place through sound, and what kinds of spaces emerge when they are rendered acoustically. What forms of spatial experience become possible when listening, rather than looking, organises perception? Focusing on The Divine Fire (1904) and Mary Olivier (1919), and drawing on recent work in cultural geography and sound studies, the paper examines how Sinclair uses voices, silences and ambient noise to produce acoustic place-worlds. These auditory cues produce spatial meaning and structure how characters inhabit and interpret their surroundings. To what extent, then, does listening function as a mode of spatial engagement in Sinclair’s fiction, shaping place as something sensed, affective and open to change?

Period	15 Jan 2026
Held at	Falmouth University, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International