Sarah Grand and the Woman Question: Dialectical Progress and Hope

Abstract

One of the staunch advocates of women’s suffrage, Sarah Grand, expresses her hope in a better future for women in her novelistic and journalistic work. In her view, two contemporary types of individuals, here referred to as the New Woman and the New Man, play an essential role in engendering societal change that helps the woman’s cause. Extensive literary criticism of Grand’s oeuvre has identified the New Man in her later work. This essay establishes that as early as her <em>succès de scandale</em> novel, <em>The Heavenly Twins</em> (1893), and the articles published a year later, Grand conjoins the New Woman and the New Man to oppugn the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres and to underscore the progress of the women’s suffrage. She paints the arduous path to progress through the New Woman’s believable partners and advocates, adequate rather than idealized examples of New Men: Dr. Galbraith, Mr. Kilroy of Ilverthorpe, Dr. Shadwell and Mr. Price. Alongside these, Grand places three characters: Evadne Frayling, a potential suffragette who marks a regress from the advances of women’s movement; Angelica Hamilton-Wells, a potential New Woman who gains a political voice by writing her husband’s speeches; and Ideala, the New Woman, a model of behavior and harbinger of hope for the female readership. Drawing from Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold and Charles Darwin, Grand dismantles the typical Victorian ideas about woman and man to emphasize the importance of education in the lives of both. For women to achieve a personal identity, the New Man needs to support her to redefine, at least partially, the ‘nature’ of woman. Through her dramatizations of models of men and women who can bring about progress, Grand initiates her reader into the changes that can help the suffrage movement gain momentum and move forward.