ALTHOUGH one of the old guard in the ranks of English novelists, May Sinclair has never been addicted to what one might term a Victorian style of writing. Her ideals may be faintly romantic, her point of view that of a retiring, gentlewomen, but her prose is terse, keen and precise. This verbal sparsity exhibits itself especially in her latest book "The Allinghams"--a work faultlessly written but unfortunately conceived.

Miss Sinclair, is above all else, a psychologist; she is that even before she is a novelist. But in this case her psychology is more akin to pathology than to an interpretation of manners and characters which is the true junction of psychological fiction. Taking a family of six children she follows their careers through the stormy era of adolescence and leaves them stranded desolate on the rocks of approaching middle age. Admittedly the family is neurotic, but disease hardly accounts for the series of catastrophes which these brothers and sisters are made to endure. Drunkenness, seduction and insanity furnish the foundation of Miss Sinclair's book. In their wake remain the utter ruins of a social group.

There are parts of "The Allinghams" which are curious mixtures of the old fashioned and the modern. Thus Angle, who of all the children is probably the most interesting and the most human, finds herself in a position which might have been transferred wholly from some cheap melodrama, but she conducts herself as regards her dilemma with the primitiveness of a Sherwood Anderson creation, not only challenging the world but challenging it with a barbaric splendor. Likewise with the tone of the entire book; its actual period is the nineties of the last century but its spirt and menner are those of the most militant modernists. If Miss Sinclair could have subdued her intensely feminine treatment in the interests of a better rounded and more sympathetic whole she would have a finer piece of work. As it is she has adorned some rather threadbare themes and situations with uncommonly fine prose. The result is a novel of severe form and structure and of rather vague and hazy material.