Sarah Grand (10 June 1854 – 12 May 1943) was a British feminist writer active from 1873 to 1922. Her work revolved around the New Woman ideal.
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Madame Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House, Donaghadee, County Down, Ireland of English parents. Her father was Edward John Bellenden Clarke (1813–1862) and her mother was Margaret Bell Sherwood (1813–1874). When her father died, her mother took her and her siblings back to Bridlington, England to be near her family who lived at Rysome Garth near Holmpton in East Yorkshire.[1]
Frances' education was very sporadic and and she lacked a formal education. Yet she managed with perseverance and enterprising work habits matured her writing to sophistication and eloquence. Her travels and encounters in life such as a loveless marriage would provide her with the details to base her writings on. Her trait qualities would be personified with many of her characters. She was however very well read.
In 1868 Frances was sent to the Royal Naval School, Twickenham, but was soon expelled for organizing groups that supported Josephine Butler's dissent against the Contagious Diseases Act, which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the unequal sole cause of the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and subjected them to indignities such as inspection of their genital and quarantined them in Lock Hospitals. [2]
Francis was then sent to a finishing school in Kensington, London. In August 1870, at the age of sixteen, she married widowed Army surgeon David Chambers McFall, who was 21 years her senior and had two sons from his previous marriage: Chambers Haldane Cooke McFall and Albert William Crawford McFall. Frances and McFall's only child, David Archibald Edward McFall, was born in Sandgate, Kent, on 7 October 1871. Her son David, latter became an actor and took the name Archie Carlow Grand.
Through the relationship to an Army Surgeon, Frances learned of the anatomical Physiology of relatively unknown nature of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, she illustrates these details in her later novel "The Heavenly Twin" warning of the emerging plague Syphilis and advocated sensitivity for the rights of the young women infected with these diseases. [3]
From 1873 to 1878 the family travelled in the Far East. The exotic tour provided, Frances with a vast wealth of descriptions and a host of relationships to base realistic, amazing, animated and colourful details to draw from. In 1879 they moved to Norwich, and in 1881 to Warrington, Lancashire where her husband retired. [4]
Upon returning to England, she was unhappy with her husband's steadily degrading sense of ethical morally sexual character, and felt constrictive. She turned to writing to cope. Her first novel Ideala, published in 1888, to limited success and much discouraging rejections. She was encouraged her to trust in her emerging literary skills to support her decision to divorce her husband in 1890. Recently enacted laws such as allowing women to retain their personal property after divorce, was an encouraging factor in her decision. [5]
She retained suffocating moments in her marriage and liberation as picturesque details in her characters to base her animations of her characters and sympathize the plight actual of pre-sufferage women with little political rights and options, trapped in oppressive marriages. Although later works would have a more sympathetic stance to males, such as Babs the Impossible in which the single noble women would feel resurgence in their worth encouraged by a idealist self made man.
Frances, transformed herself into Madame Sarah Grand, a feminine pen name, a"New Woman", an archetype she and her female contemporary colleagues progressed. Grand established the phrase "New Woman", in a debate with Ouida in 1894. [6] [7]
She lived briefly in London then latter for 20 years in Tunbridge Wells Kent, during which time she took an active part in the local women's suffrage societies, as well as travelling extensively, particularly to the United States on a lecture tour, in the wake of notorious sensational fame caused from her novel The Heavenly Twins. Although it gained her mixed angry criticism, her work was well received with notable authors as George Bernard Shaw, and Mark Twain. [8] 1920 she moved to Bath and was for several years Lady Mayoress alongside Mayor Cedric Chivers. She was well received, the villagers asked her to serve as Mayor. [9] She moved to Calne, Wiltshire, where she died in 1942.
Her work dealt with the New Woman in fiction and in fact, she wrote treatises on the subject of the failure of marriage, and her novels may be considered strongly anti-marriage polemics. However, Grand does maintain marriage as being the most holiest and perfect state of union between a man and woman. She does however state the inequality and disadvantages intended to keep young women ignorant, and that women should rebel against this fate of entrapment in a loveless marriage. [10]
The New Woman novel was a development of the late 19th century. New Woman novelists and characters encouraged and supported many different types of political action in Britain. For some women, the New Woman movement provided support for women who wanted to work and learn for themselves, and who started to question the idea of marriage and the inequality of women. For other women, especially Sarah Grand, the New Woman movement allowed women to speak out not only about the inequality of women, but about middle-class women's responsibilities to the nation.[11] In The Heavenly Twins Grand demonstrates the dangers of the moral double standard which overlooked men's promiscuity while punishing women for the same acts. More importantly, however, Grand argues in The Heavenly Twins that in order for the British nation to grow stronger, middle-class women have the responsibility of choosing mates with whom they might produce strong, well-educated children.
The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library keeps Mark Twain's copy of The Heavenly Twins. Twain filled the margins of the book with increasingly critical comments, writing after one chapter, "A cat could do better literature than this."[12]