Life and Death of Harriett Frean

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a 1922 novel by English author May Sinclair.

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is the story of Harriett Frean, a woman so afraid of life that she will eventually talk herself out of living it. The novel follows Harriet as she is raised to be the ideal Victorian woman. Harriett is proud of her self-sacrifice (which she believes is the highest love of all) but when she falls in love with her best friend's fiance she is forced to question everything she thought she knew. Having decided not to follow her heart Harriett spends the rest of her life trying to convince herself that she has done the right thing.

Described as a "small, perfect gem of a book" by author Jonathan Coe.

May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 – 14 November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. She once dressed up as a demure, rebel Jane Austen for a suffrage fundraising event. Sinclair was also a significant critic in the area of modernist poetry and prose, and she is attributed with first using the term 'stream of consciousness' in a literary context, when reviewing the first volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967), in The Egoist, April 1918.