‘We are one’: Fellowship Ideals and Social Transformation in Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael

Smith Elford discusses Mona Caird’s 1889 novel The Wing of Azrael which appeared at a time when there was a fracturing of the fellowship ideals that had motivated feminists involved in the many associations that discussed cultural and political reform and debated new ideologies like socialism, feminism, and anarchism. As a result of this, women writers including Emma Brooke, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird, used fiction to articulate their fellowship ideals. Smith Elford shows that Caird used fiction to underscore the need for structural change in women’s actual social conditions, while also portraying an outline of her feminist fellowship ideals. In this way, Caird also expresses affinity with, rather than difference from, her Victorian feminist, socialist, and anarchist contemporaries, alongside her concern with the issues women faced in the contemporary moment. The Wing of Azrael, Smith Elford argues, portrays relationships among women as central to social transformation, suggesting female fellowship and partnership as a catalyst for social change.