Shrieking Sisters and Bawling Brothers: Sibling Rivalry in Sarah Grand and Mary Cholmondeley

Abstract

This chapter explores conflicts between brothers and sisters in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899), where domestic disputes over property and money focus the discussion of rivalry on material issues. Yet the balance of power between the siblings hangs on competing narratives and conflicting readings as much as it depends on quantifiable legal and pecuniary gains. Contrasting interpretations of the text that both brother and sister claim to share — the Bible — promote their competing claims to authorship and possession. Both novels locate the issue of unequal inheritance at the core of the power struggle between the sexes in general, and family discord in particular. Grand and Cholmondeley present primogeniture as a system that perpetuates women’s cultural, social and financial dispossession, and examine its effects against the backdrop of contemporary political debates about women’s rights to their own possessions and biblical tales of sibling rivalry.KeywordsSister RelationshipSibling RivalryWoman WriterDomestic DisputeBiblical InterpretationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.