+- Story-Portal (https://time-tales.af/storys)
+-- Forum: EBOOK (https://time-tales.af/storys/forumdisplay.php?fid=27)
+--- Forum: EBOOK (https://time-tales.af/storys/forumdisplay.php?fid=28)
+--- Thread: Sinister Street (first published 1913) (/showthread.php?tid=2819)
Sinister Street (first published 1913) - Simon - 12-17-2025
Sinister Street is a 1913-14 novel or bildungsroman about a young man's coming of age. The child of an unconventional love affair, Michael Fane grows up with more than his share of passion and ambition. His vague and beautiful mother drifts in and out of his life, and he passes from the care of a governess into the rougher discipline of a public school and then on to young manhood at Oxford. Attracted at first by the religious life, Micahel soon finds that London at the end of the nineteenth century offers more worldly diversions. It is as the result of a liaison with the fascinating and destructive Lily that he begins to see that his future lies in his own hands.
Sinister Street was first published in two volumes, the first in 1913, the second in the following year. Henry James, in a letter to Hugh Walpole, described it as “really a very interesting and remarkable performance… at one and the same time so extremely young… and so confoundingly mature.”
In an article, he named Compton Mackenzie as one of the four young novelists most likely to sustain the greatest traditions of English fiction.
Year by year the novel has sold steadily and established itself as one of the classics of its age. It is the story of a young man who passed through a public school and Oxford in the first decade of this century and whose experiences culminated in the byways of London, and it has been justly described by Mr. Frank Swinnerton as “the record of a departed generation”. But, while manners and conditions have changed, its appeal retains the same force for every succeeding generation, because the story is concerned with the perpetual problems of romantic youth.