Beth Book Research Articles

“Challenging the Divisions between Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Sarah Grand: Conceptions of Authorship in The Beth Book (1897) and The Infidel (1900)

In The Beth Book (1879) and The Infidel (1900), Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Sarah Grand employed fictional writers to question professional authorship, confront contemporary social discourses, and participate in the literary fashion which pervaded fin-de-siècle fiction. As this article demonstrates, looking in depth at the resonances between The Beth Book and The Infidel sheds new light on the complex interrelation between these famous authors, their novels, and across the wider Victorian literary marketplace. The unlikely pairing disrupts the divisions that can still interrupt Victorian literary studies and hamper the critical work done in isolation on Braddon and Grand. The Beth Book and The Infidel, and their fictional authors Beth Maclure and Antonia Thorburn, are a conscious choice to enter the conversations pervading and shaping the social and literary spheres. Through their careers, Braddon and Grand may speak to their readerships in markedly differing styles and time frames but their fictional depictions of the decisions, barriers, and opportunities faced by women writers, including the New Woman, provide a fresh perspective from which to examine these influential women writers’ place in the social and literary spheres.

From a "Child of Light" to a "Woman of Genius": Sarah Grand's The Beth Book as the New Woman Bildungsroman

The New Woman fiction, popular in the last decade of the 19th century, contested the traditional notions of gender roles and participated in the public debates on women’s rights. The protagonists of the New Woman novels refused to conform to the submissive and self-abnegating Victorian ideal of femininity. The article discusses the ways in which Sarah Grand, a prominent New Woman novelist and social activist, uses and transforms both the elements of her own life and the Bildungsroman conventions in her 1897 novel The Beth Book to create a heroine whose growth and development result in her personal independence and her active public engagement in women’s issues. Cast in a variety of social roles, Beth Maclure reclaims her agency and becomes an embodiment of the New Woman.

Tomboys in Sarah Grand’s New Woman Fiction

Abstract Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Babs the Impossible (1901) both feature overtly tomboyish protagonists, in what I argue is an effort to shift notions of femininity and gender identity and to adopt gender-neutral qualities as features of the New Woman – qualities such as independence, comradeship, and loyalty to other human beings. In this essay, I argue that Grand attempted to soften resistance to the New Woman by focusing on tomboyism in childhood (utilizing people’s tendency to feel favourably towards children) and then extending tomboy qualities to New Womanhood while providing the Victorian public with an exemplar of independent and robust femininity. The critical difference between a prototypical tomboy figure and the one in New Woman fiction is that the latter keeps their tomboyism after maturity, sublimating the trait into her inborn self, faithful to herself and her ideas. Beyond the trope of the childhood tomboy, Grand aimed to bolster and strengthen womanhood by adopting tomboyism as an extension of a inborn self and redefine notions of acceptable female behaviour, thereby expanding the scope of womanhood.

Beth Caldwell's Reading Experience

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Grand coined the phrase "New Woman," which was influential throughout the first wave of the feminist movement. This paper examines how Sarah Grand's representation of Beth Caldwell's reading habits in her novel The Beth Book acts as a metaphor for the subversive femininity of the New Woman. My project explores the ways in which Grand's feminist ideals are reflected in The Beth Book through the scenes when Beth is reading. I suggest that Beth's atypical engagement with books as textual and physical objects can be equated to social dissent. However, Grand also portrays Beth reading within educational and marital institutions. These experiences lead Beth's engagement with the text to become similar to common nineteenth-century reading practices. I conclude with the argument that Grand represents any personal engagement with a book, even if it is not especially radical, as capable of re-evaluating systemically-enforced interpretations.

Sarah Grand’s “When the Door Opened__”: Latchkeys, Liberty, and Liminality

Sarah Grand’s “When the Door Opened__”: Latchkeys, Liberty, and Liminality Anne-Marie Beller (bio) Sarah grand is usually associated with didactic non-fiction, primarily her provocative 1894 article “New Aspects of the Woman Question,” which is credited with having coined the term “New Woman.” She is also known as the author of novels anchored in the realist mode, such as The [End Page 192] Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897). Yet Grand’s short fiction offers a different perspective, revealing her to be an often innovative writer who plays with form and narrative in unexpected ways. “When the Door Opened__” was first published in the Idler in January 1898, then later included in Grand’s short story collection, Emotional Moments, in 1904. The story is marked by fragmentariness, ambiguity, fluidity, and open-endedness. It begins with a reflective passage about the aesthetics of human affairs, wherein modernity is foregrounded through a series of tropes focused around crowds, transport, the bustle of urban life, and the idea of incompleteness. Grand’s method here is suggestive of later Modernist vignettes by writers such as Virginia Woolf. Indeed, certain phrases and images in this opening paragraph seem to anticipate Woolf ’s famous statements in “Modern Fiction” (1919).1 Grand writes: What curious glimpses of life one catches sometimes unawares, scenes that flash forth distinctly from the tangled mass of movement, the crowded details, the inextricable confusion of human affairs as they appear to the looker-on in a great city. Seen amidst all the turmoil, from a hansom cab, from the top of an omnibus, from the platform of an underground station in a train that stops for a minute, from the pavement in a carriage blocked in the stream of traffic, by day and night, . . . these intervals of intensity, the beginnings of episodes—tragic, heroic, amorous, abject; or the conclusions, which make the turning point the crisis of a life. If it be the beginning, how one aches to know what the end will be; and if it be the end, what would not one give for the first part! (Grand 217) This sense of fiction capturing mere “glimpses of life” is a decided break with the explicit coherence and confident cohesiveness of the Victorian realist novel. In its implicit acknowledgement of the necessarily incomplete nature of human experience as artistically rendered, Grand’s opening positions her story squarely within an emerging Modernist sensibility. Yet it is also cognate with certain experimental writing of the late 1890s and early years of the twentieth century—for example, with the literary impressionism of Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London (1905), which similarly emphasizes the resistance of the movement and flux of the modern city to being captured in fiction: “One sees, too, so many little bits of un-completed life” (Hueffer 60); “the constant succession of much smaller happenings . . . that one never sees completed, [which] gives to looking out of train windows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction” (61). Grand’s story, as alluded to in her opening paragraph and echoed in Ford’s text, problematizes the issue of endings by resisting closure [End Page 193] and leaving the reader with an ambiguous and unexplained conclusion. Following the reflections discussed above, the narrator enters into conversation with an unnamed man who is sharing the carriage. After passing comment on an unhappily married couple who have just vacated the train, the man proceeds to reveal his own domestic situation. What initially seems to be the description of a progressive marriage, founded on the husband’s trust and respect of his wife, gradually gives way to an exposure of the man’s underlying insecurities when faced with circumstances that appear to demonstrate the essential duplicity and wantonness of women. After following his wife to a masked ball, the man mistakes her for a flirtatious woman of dubious morals who happens to be wearing the same costume. With a view to testing his supposed wife’s fidelity, he takes the woman home. At the moment of discovery and realization of his own compromised position, the husband hears his wife’s latchkey in the door. At this climactic point in his...

Narratorial authority in Sarah Grand’s Beth Book (1897)

The Beth Book est un roman d’apprentissage féministe au contenu en partie autobiographique. Fondant son autorité sur une analyse historique et un discours religieux et scientifique, l’instance narrative finit par octroyer à Beth le titre de génie féminin. Pourtant, un vide entoure le contenu de « l’art pour l’homme » de Beth ; de son ouvrage, on ne sait ni le titre ni le contenu mais seulement qu’il ne s’agit pas de fiction ; les derniers mots du roman sont le nom de son « Chevalier », un écrivain qui croit que le génie des femmes consiste à susciter celui des hommes. Tout en évitant les formes de didactisme les plus directes, Sarah Grand a placé au centre de son roman engagé la tâche de la narratrice omnisciente qui va faire progresser Beth en position d’orateur de génie. Au cours de ce processus, la narratrice acquiert une conscience historique et un sexe.

“Having to Think in Inverted Commas”: Feminine Discourse and Foreign Words in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897)

The Beth Book is a feminist novel belonging to the genre of New Woman fiction, telling the Bildung of a woman of genius. Beth owes her talent for public speaking to her childhood days in Victorian Ireland, where she was sensitized to oral storytelling and to the politics of language. Beth feels estranged from her mother tongue, the language of the patriarchal canon, the hypercorrect English which is taught to young ladies. Beth “only ha[s] one language, yet it is not [hers]” (Derrida). Her apprenticeship will take her through the traditional phases of imitation and purge, but her conquest of language is presented as a return to a magical language of origins, which speaks through her rather than is spoken by her. Is female genius meant to preserve rather than create? Once she becomes an orator, her speeches make people raise their fists and cause inverted commas to fall.

“The Mesmeric Power”: Sarah Grand and the Novel of the Female Orator

The “feminist trilogy” novels of the English New Woman author Sarah Grand culminate, after a long and tortuous course, in a vision of the female public speaker, described by the narrator as “one of the first swallows of the woman’s summer” (Beth Book 527). Surprisingly, Grand’s works have not yet been placed into conversation with other novels portraying female orators. Her trilogy directly intervenes in this strain of fiction, which unfolds approximately from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the propaganda novels of the militant suffragette era. By her own account, Grand’s first novel portrays a heroine typifying “not a perfect, but a transitional state . . . , a state which may have its repulsive features” (Ideala 5). By the trilogy’s final entry, Grand reframes a pejoratively cast “mesmeric power” for charismatic speech in the far more positive terms of what she calls “genius.” In the process, she successfully transforms the female public speaker from a curious anomaly to the harbinger of feminist triumph. In this essay, I consider the roughly half-century lineage of the novel of the female orator, which includes contributions by Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot, followed by even more explicit treatments in Henry James, Grand, and Elizabeth Robins. What emerges from this consideration is a view of a contested strain of the nineteenth-century novel, within which the female orator was the object of satire and scrutiny before her successful emergence in the suffragette novel. Across the nineteenth century, iterations of this figure are alternately condemned or apotheosized through the use of the rhetoric of the mesmeric and the supernatural. The story of what I call the novel of the female orator—there was never a discrete genre for the female orator—begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), and ends with the sudden evaporation of the suffragette novel at the outset of the First World War. Its development is intertwined with the “debate about female publicity” (Harman 2), chronicled in such studies as Barbara Leah Harman’s The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England. Harman argues that the

The late Victorian gothic: mental science, the uncanny and scenes of writing

Writers, mental scientists and spiritualists at the fin-de-siecle were haunted by their impossible desire to contain the inchoate elements of the supernatural within the fixity of print. By examining technologies of writing such as the automatic writing of the spiritualist seances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, different genres and late nineteenth-century technologies of mental science, this thesis will show that despite writers’ attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural, these tools are incomplete and the supernatural remains only a partially legible script. In addition, the thesis examines how both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind problematised agency. Is the author dictating to the typewriting machine, or is the machine the secret dictator regulating the author’s stylistic choices? Is the spirit at the seance ghostwriting the text? Issues of uncanny authorship are explored in the first chapter, in particular through a close reading of Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’ (1891). The uncanny effects of new technology on the body are also explored in James’s ‘In the Cage’ (1898), and Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ (1901). Chapter Two takes the example of Doyle and how he used the photograph as a technology to attempt to capture the supernatural. Chapter Three looks at mesmerism as a technology of the mind. Chapter Four indicates that traditional notions of Victorian womanhood, as well as writings on mental science, implied that women themselves were ghostly. Chapter Five turns to Vernon Lee, for whom the ghost story blurs literary genres, making indistinct fiction and non-fiction, ghost story and critical essay. Chapter Six returns to a discussion of the ways in which paranormal perception inspires women writers. An examination of Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) implies that New Woman writers find the altered states they access in their writing both ecstatic and agonising. A re-examination of the uncanny effects of technology through a close reading of Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) shows that in New Woman fiction, women have the freedom to engage with writing technologies like the typewriter either actively or passively.

<i>Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman George Robb Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. By Angelique Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 272. $39.95 (paper). This succinct and entertaining book, first published in 2003, examines how feminists, especially New Woman writers like Sarah Grand and George Egerton, employed eugenic ideas to argue “for the vital contribution of women in regenerating the British imperial race” (xv). Angelique Richardson convincingly argues for the central role played by women in the popularization of eugenics, the now-discredited but once highly influential science of selective breeding, in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This new paperback edition should give the book a wider readership, which it richly deserves. The eugenics movement, which reached its high point in the early twentieth century, not surprisingly became enmeshed in political and cultural debates over the “woman question.” With its emphasis on reproduction [End Page 345] and racial regeneration, eugenics was inextricably linked to contemporary concerns regarding marriage, motherhood, and appropriate gender roles. Just as Victorian medicine provided biological justification for the subordination of women, eugenics could also bolster traditional gender hierarchies. Conservative eugenists, such as the movement’s founder, Francis Galton, feared that the achievement of feminist goals would divert the most accomplished women from their primary eugenic responsibility: motherhood. Still, as Richardson argues, eugenics was not only a tool of patriarchy. Women were active in the British Eugenics Society, and many prominent eugenists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby supported suffrage and higher education for women. Eugenic ideas and language were also widely employed by British feminists to buttress their arguments for liberation. This is an aspect of eugenic thought that has been underappreciated by historians and literary critics, though not to the extent that Richardson imagines. The claim that she “explores for the first time, the intimate relations between eugenics and some feminists” is an exaggeration (i). A number of scholars—Rosaleen Love, Lucy Bland, Joy Dixon, and myself—have examined feminist eugenics, though much of our work is unacknowledged by Richardson in her notes and bibliography. Such complaints aside, Love and Eugenics is a marvelous survey of the eugenics movement and its intersections with Victorian feminism and popular culture. Based on an extensive reading of primary source materials —journalistic debates, popular scientific writings, New Woman novels, and the correspondence of prominent eugenists—Richardson’s book vividly brings to life a lost world of fin de siècle social fears and scientific bravado. The author provides brief but lucid overviews of evolutionary thought, hereditarian debates, the scientific construction of women, and social purity crusades. Disparate strands of Victorian culture are drawn deftly together. After introductory chapters covering eugenics, feminism, and social purity politics, the book concentrates on the eugenic writings of three prominent feminists: Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Mona Caird. In her day, Grand was the most celebrated proponent of eugenic love, and her best-selling novels, The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897), explored the misery of marrying without rational selection. Like most social purity feminists, Grand argued that men had a natural tendency toward vice and promiscuity, while women had instincts for virtue and chastity. Women should therefore be given the chief role in the making of marriages, as only they “were sufficiently race aware to make responsible sexual choices” (56). Richardson gives astute readings of Grand’s novels, especially highlighting the author’s antipathy to sentimental, romantic novels and the degenerative effects of modern culture. In The Heavenly Twins, for example, the heroine, Evadne, prefers reading medical textbooks to silly love stories. Armed with such knowledge, she avoids marriage to a syphilitic, unlike the more conventional Edith, who dies after giving birth to a deformed child. [End Page 346] Like Sarah Grand, the writer George Egerton (the penname of Mary Dunne Bright) also promoted the idea that women were more in touch with nature and thus better able to select biologically fit fathers for their children. However, as Richardson points out, Egerton was more socially radical, often seeing marriage and conventional morality as obstacles to good breeding. In Egerton...

<em>Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel</em>, by Molly Youngkin

Reviewed by: Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel Diana Maltz (bio) Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel, by Molly Youngkin; pp. viii + 218. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007, $39.95, $9.95 CD-ROM. Molly Youngkin's monograph is the first comprehensive study to examine and theorize the significance of literary reviews in two feminist periodicals of the fin de siècle, Shafts and The Woman's Herald. Youngkin argues that these journals determined a standard by which to judge New Woman literature while also hastening a modernist aesthetic through their affirmation of characters' inner lives. Youngkin coins the term "feminist realism" to characterize a brand of realist fiction that depicted women's internalized consciousness and valued it as a precondition for their further acts of agency. She builds her study on three avenues to women's freedom—thought, speech, and action—and three correlative narrative strategies that novelists used to express them—internal perspective, dialogue, and description of concrete acts. In chapter 1, Youngkin explores female characters' internal awakenings in fictions by Sarah Grand and Thomas Hardy. Fin-de-siècle theorists believed that feminist consciousness could be disseminated ethereally as "thought influence" (42), and Grand adopted this line of thinking when claiming her role as a medium for ideas already in the air. In nonfiction essays, Grand emphasized the New Woman's intelligence and the necessity for women's continuous self-education. Her novels vary in their delineation of women's consciousness. Although the eponymous protagonist of Ideala (1888) moves from self-realization to activism, a male first-person narrator limits access to her thoughts. Women in The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897) recognize their marginalization, but not all are able to transform this into personal agency. Youngkin then turns to Hardy, arguing that because he refuses to illuminate their internal perspectives, his women lack the conviction borne of "increased consciousness" (55). Instead, they assert agency through action, culminating in Sue Bridehead's semi-comic leap through the window to avoid Phillotson and Tess Durbeyfield's murder of Alec. Youngkin concludes that as speakers both women are unable to navigate and dispute the ideological discourses marshaled against them. Summarily, New Woman critics such as Dora Montefiore and Mary Eliza Haweis recognized inconsistencies in Hardy's character development but praised his representation of women's struggles against cultural conditions. Chapter 2 focuses on the spoken word, juxtaposing George Gissing's techniques in representing Rhoda Nunn and Nancy Lord against Mona Caird's more measured attribution of internal perspective and dialogue to female characters in The Daughters of Danaus (1894). One reviewer asserted that Rhoda Nunn forfeits intellect by recoiling from Everard's alleged adultery, but Youngkin rightly qualifies this claim, tracing scenes of Rhoda in contemplation, albeit late in the book. Gissing's development of Nancy Lord betrays a similar unevenness, for, after showing promise, Nancy compromises her feminist resistance by the novel's conclusion. By contrast, the women's press lauded Caird's protagonist Hadria Fullerton for exercising thought, speech, and action in her efforts to negotiate a balance between liberty and duty. Youngkin contextualizes Caird's investments by referencing her nonfiction and public debates on marriage and suffrage in women's clubs and the press. As chapter 3 reveals, the feminist press charged novelists with envisioning [End Page 734] vigorous, assertive role models. George Meredith's plots, however baroque and obscure, pivoted on women's acts of resistance; his Diana of the Crossways (1885) was particularly praised in the women's press. More complexly, Ménie Muriel Dowie's writings on female adventure offer a self-contradictory slant on the action-oriented woman. The impulsive heroine of A Girl in the Karpathians (1891) frequently acts without any clear political intent, but upon observing Eastern practices is compelled to question Western constructs of female propriety. Dowie's later Women Adventurers (1893) celebrates historical women who disguised themselves as soldiers by following their husbands to war, yet in the preface...

Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle, and: Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle, and: Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Martha Vicinus (bio) Kirsten MacLeod , Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), ix +222 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 333 97700 9). Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), xii + 210 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 333 97700 9). These books are representative of the current critical reappraisal of the fin-de-siècle, usually defined as the years 1880-1913. Until recently, its literature and authors were condemned to the status of irretrievably minor, haunted by scandal (the trial of Oscar Wilde), suicide (Ernest Dowson and John Davidson), and alcohol (Lionel Johnson died after falling off a bar stool). But then feminist critics discovered the 'New Woman' novels of the period, and Sarah Grand, 'George Egerton', 'Lucas Malet' and others enjoyed a second life. Influential studies by Regenia Gagnier and Jonathan Freedman placed Aestheticism in the context of the market place, demonstrating the power of modern capitalism to turn art and literature into commodities. James A. Nelson and Margaret Stetz unravelled the economics of fine-art publishing, concluding that avant-garde publishers always hoped to turn a profit. Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow, among many others, did much to recuperate forgotten poets, many of whom lived long and vigorous lives. Critics have emphasized the variety of work published during these decades, its marked refusal of Victorian literary norms, and its formal experimentation. Aestheticism was the single most powerful literary movement ofthe late nineteenth century. The groundwork for privileging art over materialism had been laid by that great Victorian moralist, John Ruskin, but a younger generation insisted upon creating art without a moral lesson. Writers such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds and Bernard Berenson assumed that their work would appeal only to the enlightened intelligentsia. They laid the ground for professionals – the art connoisseur, interior decorator and high-brow literary critic, who could advise the reader on the best works to admire and purchase. [End Page 158] Karin MacLeod points out in her useful survey, the aesthetic goals of the 1870s and 1880s led naturally to the Decadent movement of the 1890s. Unlike Aesthetes, the Decadents flaunted their dilettantism and desire to shock the bourgeoisie. Following Baudelaire, the Decadents boldly insisted on the beauty of ugliness. The music hall was discovered, and its ribald jokes and saucy lyrics praised as the quintessence of urban life. Writers flaunted their adherence to an aristocratic dilettantism and a working-class sensuality; their notoriety made good copy, even if it did not sell books, as MacLeod astutely notes. MacLeod considers the interpenetration of aesthetic, high art and popular fiction. She shrewdly notes that popular writers such as Marie Corelli exploited the fascination with the lives of the Decadents by proclaiming her superior morality and creating attractively decadent villains. Other women writers found it more difficult to capitalize on the hunger for titillating characters. Such New Women writers as Sarah Grand attacked the trivialization of art by 'clever young men', and argued the importance of literature with a purpose. Nevertheless, her negative portrait of Decadence in The Beth Book (1897) was condemned by some as too preachy and by others as lewd and suggestive. Vernon Lee had attempted to create a satiric portrait of a misogynistic aesthete in her novel Miss Brown (1884). She too had met with a chilly critical reception, even though she was an admired member of London's top literary circles. MacLeod effectively traces the continuing power of male critical authority throughout the period, and the difficulty women faced if they wished to gain both critical respect and a male readership. MacLeod's most original contribution to fin-de-siècle studies is her chapters on two neglected writers, Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. Both men began as Decadents, publishing their best known works in John Lane's Keynote series. Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Shiel's Prince Zaleski (1895) are what she calls 'a collaboration of high and low' literary elements (128). Machen specialized in combining...

From Stunted Child to 'New Woman': The Significance of Physical Growth in Late-Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Fiction

This paper explores the significance of physical growth to late-nineteenth-century medicine and literature. Important changes in the way that growth was understood came about after the discovery, in 1890, that feeding sheep's thyroid to children suffering from cretinism made them grow and develop. What emerges in the 1890s is the sense that children were not unalterably stunted by their surroundings or degeneratively arrested in their growth, but that the development of their nervous system, and their subsequent increase in size, was possible. Using Sarah Grand's "The Beth Book" (1897) as an example, this paper shows the way in which New Woman novelists used the emergent rhetoric of growth to propel their own demands to be allowed intellectual freedom and development of their own.

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

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.

Reevaluating Female “Inferiority”: Sarah Grand Versus Charles Darwin

The figure of darwin hovered like a specter over the fin de siècle, not only the Darwin of the explosive 1859On the Origin of Speciesthat redirected evolutionary thinking but also the author of the 1871Descent of Man— a less heralded work, though generating equally significant repercussions with its pronouncements on the intellectual capacities of the sexes. By linking a perceived mental inferiority of women to the mechanism of evolution, Darwin seemingly brought scientific proof to support a cultural truism. In so doing, he reinforced Victorian strictures that maintained women in a subservient state, which now could be justified on the basis of biological determinism. Yet Sarah Grand's popular 1897 novel,The Beth Book, contests the Darwinian verities, questioning the scientists' specious conclusions about sex-linked traits and identifying culture as an equally significant force determining the mental dispositions of the sexes.