Mona Caird

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Standard Name: Caird, Mona
Birth Name: Alice Mona Alison
Married Name: Alice Mona Caird
Pseudonym: G. Noel Hatton
Pseudonym: The Author of Whom Nature Leadeth
MC , until recently very little remembered, caused a sensation in 1888 with her articles calling for reform in marriage practices. She was already at that date a published novelist, and went on issuing novels until 1931, the year before her death, as well as essays, short stories, travel writing, and journalism. She was an important member of the group of New Woman writers of the 1890s, and campaigned in fiction and non-fiction for a group of related causes: improved status for women (in education, marriage, divorce, child-rearing, job opportunities, and voting rights), anti-vivisection, pacificism, and international co-operation. She was a writer of high intellectual ability, and her characteristic tone is trenchant, satirical, and often bleakly comic.

Connections

Connections Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Sarah Grand
An entire literary-social movement evolved alongside SG 's writings about the New Woman. New Woman fiction, amounting to a new genre, had already been produced by George Egerton in 1893, and was produced by Iota (Kathleen Caffyn)
Textual Production Eliza Lynn Linton
Also in 1891 in Nineteenth Century appeared The Wild Women as Social Insurgents, an attack on feminists which Deborah T. Meem considers may be the first reference in print to a butch or butching...
Textual Production Jane Hume Clapperton
This piece, part of the debate that followed Mona Caird 's famous or infamous August 1888 Westminster Review article, Marriage, was written in specific response to an article by Elizabeth Rachel Chapman entitled Marriage...
Textual Features Elinor Glyn
Whereas on love EG sounds overwhelmingly passionate, on marriage she sounds noticeably cynical. In a section of the book devoted to the question, Why Marriage is Often a Failure, she suggests that because marriage...
Textual Features Kathleen Caffyn
Critic Stephanie Forward has pointed out that at this date the colour yellow signified avant-garde and slightly dangerous fashion, as had been recognised in such literary works as Mona Caird 's The Yellow Drawing-Room and...
Author summary Henrik Ibsen
The plays of Henrik Ibsen , nineteenth-century Norwegian poet and dramatist, were both controversial and enormously influential in Britain; their use of realist techniques to address contemporary social problems helped to bring about a revolution...
politics Charlotte Perkins Gilman
During the course of lecturing on women's issues CPG established warm relations with many of the leaders of the struggle for women's rights in Britain, notably Mona Caird .
Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester University Press.
162
politics Annie S. Swan
A great event of the literary year at this time was the Women Writers' Dinner at the Trocadero restaurant, an idea first conceived by Honor Morten . ASS mentioned in her autobiographical account that the...
Occupation Anna Livia
She also this year became the director of the Feminist Press in London, a position she held until 1989.
Anna Livia,. “Anna Livia Julian Brawn: Curriculum Vitae”. University of California, Berkeley: Department of French.
(Reprints from the Press during these years included Mona Caird 's The Daughters of Danaus.)
Literary responses Emma Frances Brooke
Recently Carolyn Christensen Nelson has connected EFB 's optimistic view of marriage at the conclusion of this novel with Mona Caird 's Marriage (her well-known Westminster Review article of August 1888). Caird writes: men and...
Leisure and Society Mathilde Blind
She and Mona Caird enjoyed going on long walks together in the countryside around Wendover near Oxford, of which Blind kept a record in her commonplace-book.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research.
30
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Grand
Margaret Oliphant , reviewing the novel for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1889, described it as the expression of a great many thoughts of the moment, and of a desire which is stronger than it ever...
Intertextuality and Influence Henrietta Müller
The article begins with a favourable reference to G. Noel Hatton 's Whom Nature Leadeth, which Müller finds to illustrate with precision the inequitable nature of marriage in its present state. Although the husband...
Intertextuality and Influence Flora Annie Steel
FAS brackets her extremely touching story between two overt comparisons of Indian with British culture, not to the latter's advantage. No matter how barbarous the marriage customs of India, FAS writes that Uma confronts...
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Hume Clapperton
JHC 's work influenced both the women's movement and advocates for social change generally. It became, according to Mohan Rao , the principal text of eugenics in the nineteenth century.
Rao, Mohan. From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic. Sage Publications.
93
In his article Socialism...

Timeline

Late 1888: Harry Quilter published Is Marriage a Failure?,...

Building item

Late 1888

Harry Quilter published Is Marriage a Failure?, a collection of contributions to the debate aroused by Mona Caird 's critique of marriage.

1890: Elizabeth A. Sharp, as Mrs William Sharp,...

Women writers item

1890

Elizabeth A. Sharp , as Mrs William Sharp, published the anthologyWomen Poets of the Victorian Era.

June 1897: The first issue of The Adult, a periodical...

Building item

June 1897

The first issue of The Adult, a periodical from the Legitimation League , appeared: it campaigned for the rights of the illegitimate and for sex education.

31 May 1898: George Bedborough, secretary of the Legitimation...

Building item

31 May 1898

George Bedborough , secretary of the Legitimation League which sought to change the law to improve the position of illegitimate children, was arrested, largely in an attempt to damage the League through him.

March 1911: The Idler monthly (launched as a sixpenny...

Writing climate item

March 1911

The Idlermonthly (launched as a sixpenny magazine in 1892) ceased publication.

Texts

Caird, Mona. A Romance of the Moors. J. W. Arrowsmith, 1891.
Caird, Mona. “Marriage”. Westminster Review, Vol.
130
, pp. 186-01.
Caird, Mona. One That Wins. T. Fisher Unwin, 1887.
Caird, Mona. The Daughters of Danaus. Bliss, Sands and Foster, 1894.
Caird, Mona. The Great Wave. Wishart, 1931.
Caird, Mona. The Morality of Marriage. George Redway, 1897.
Caird, Mona. The Morality of Marriage. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Caird, Mona. The Pathway of the Gods. Skeffington and Son, 1898.
Caird, Mona. The Stones of Sacrifice. Simpkin, Marshall, 1915.
Caird, Mona. The Wing of Azrael. Trübner, 1889.
Caird, Mona. Whom Nature Leadeth. Longmans, Green, 1883.