The Nature of the Evidence by May Sinclair and read by Christopher Halton

"The Nature of the Evidence" was first published in 1912 in The English Review.

When barrister Edward Marston remarries after the tragic death of his beloved first wife, he believes his grief has settled into memory. But on his wedding night, in the very house Rosamund once filled with quiet devotion, her presence returns—tender, inexorable, and unmistakably real. What begins as a single uncanny vision tightens into a haunting that not only bars Marston from his new bride, Pauline, but reveals a passion deeper and more terrifying than anything flesh and blood can bear.

Is Rosamund protecting her place in his life—or claiming a love that death itself could not extinguish?

This story is read by Chris Halton.

May Sinclair (1863–1946), born Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair in Rock Ferry, Cheshire, was an English novelist, critic, poet, and philosopher whose work bridged late Victorian realism and early modernism. Deeply interested in psychology, mysticism, and the inner life, she gained recognition for her nuanced explorations of consciousness and emotion—often depicting how repression, love, and belief shape human experience. Sinclair was among the first writers to employ the stream of consciousness technique in English fiction, and she was the first critic to use that term publicly in a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s work.

Her fiction, including The Divine Fire (1904), The Tree of Heaven (1917), and The Combined Maze (1913), examines conflicts between duty and desire, intellect and intuition, and the pressures of social convention. During World War I, Sinclair volunteered with an ambulance unit in Belgium and recorded her experiences in A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), one of the earliest literary responses to the war.

In the 1920s, she turned increasingly toward the supernatural as a means of expressing emotional and metaphysical insight. This interest culminated in her collection Uncanny Stories (1923), which includes “The Token.” The story exemplifies her blending of psychological realism with the supernatural, using the ghostly or symbolic not for horror but as a metaphor for unspoken love and the persistence of emotional truth beyond death. Across her career, Sinclair’s writing illuminated the hidden life of the mind and spirit, earning her recognition as a crucial—if long underappreciated—figure in British modernist and speculative literature.

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