The Child and the "Genius": New Science in Sarah Grand's The Beth Book

Abstract

Sarah Grand's autobiographical novel, The Beth Book; Being a Study from Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, A Woman of Genius (1897), draws on expanding interest in psychology of childhood and new hereditarian paradigms in narrating progress of its female protagonist, Beth. This paper will consider these theoretical developments and demonstrate how, in literary and scientific discourses within context of a shared cultural register of evolutionism, child and the genius were interlinked in light of concerns about cultural and national progress at thefin de siecle. Frances Bellenden Clarke (1854 -1943) reinvented herself as New Woman writer, Madame Sarah Grand. As a best-selling novelist she became a leading figure in late nineteenth-century social purity feminism. Her fiction explores possibility of female emancipation and contested gender roles whilst endorsing marriage and motherhood of highest standard exacted by sexually selective Women of Future.' Grand was by no means advocating sanctity of domestic, indeed The Beth Book in particular tears apart the secret life of home2so cherished by those conservative writers who were scourges of New Woman. Grand's moralistic stance, produced through evolutionary discourses, sees higher nature of women as befitting progressive race leadership, conflating fears of racial degeneration with rebuttals of professional discourses which sought to bar women from career and higher education.