‘Development and Arrest of Development’: Sarah Grand’s ‘Girls of Today’

Abstract

If Schreiner anticipated many of the issues connected to the modern girl of today, in this chapter I argue that Sarah Grand was in direct conversation with contemporary debates about girlhood in her novels The Heavenly Twins (1893), The Beth Book (1897) and Babs the Impossible (1901). In this chapter, I make the case for the integral relationship between this engagement with girlhood and the political potency and feminist bravado of her novels. I suggest that Grand contributes to wider discussions about girlhood in three main ways: through her depiction of girlhood as a time of agency and energy—a period of significance in its own right; through her interrogation of the thresholds and markers that are supposed to define girlhood but often fall short of doing so for complex, exceptional characters such as Angelica in The Heavenly Twins; and through a valorization of the role of community and communication in girls’ lives. In depicting fictional girls who relate remarkably closely to the heroines of girls’ books and magazines, I suggest that Grand offers what we might consider to be portraits of ‘the new girl’s new girl’.