The Divine Fire

May Sinclair's *The Divine Fire* (1904) is an ambitious Künstlerroman tracing Maurice Avery's formation as a writer amid the aesthetic, intellectual, and social pressures of fin-de-siècle London. Its "divine fire" signifies both artistic vocation and the dangerous idealism that can consume those who pursue it: inspiration must contend with vanity, economic necessity, erotic entanglement, and the c...