Exploring Women’s Possibilities at the Fin de Siècle: Sarah Grand’s Quest for Women’s Enlightenment

While she is widely credited with having coined the term ‘New Woman,’ Sarah Grand’s feminist agenda is transitional rather than consistently radical. In her best-known novel The Heavenly Twins (1893), a series of narrators experiment with different ways of presenting women’s lives to the reading public. The novel features three young women—Evadne Frayling, Edith Beale, and Angelica Hamilton-Wells—who appear to follow acceptable versions of the pattern demanded of young women at the time. Like the Tenor in the inset ‘The Tenor and the Boy,’ the reader is at first unaware of the lengths the frustrated Angelica has gone to in order to elude patriarchal expectations. Only by borrowing her brother’s clothes and identity is she able to go where she likes and speak her mind freely. Grand often uses women’s confining clothing as an analogy of the restrictions placed on their mental activity. In the same novel, the idealistic Evadne is driven to the point of breakdown when she is denied a public voice, and the carefully protected Edith falls prey to disease passed on by her faithless husband. The inference is clear: in the town of Morningquest, the pastoral idyll enacted by Angelica is impossible, indeed the very name suggests an incomplete process. Grand later became a suffrage orator, but her fiction reveals that the brighter future for which she and Angelica yearn is not present yet.