Mona Caird

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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.

Milestones

24 May 1854

Alice Mona Alison, who later wrote as MC , was born at 34 Pier Street in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. She remained an only child.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

August 1888

Mona Caird 's signed article Marriage appeared in the Westminster Review, instigating the most famous newspaper controversy of the nineteenth century,
Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press.
180
as a recent critic calls it.
Westminster Review. Baldwin, Cradock and Joy.
130 (1888): 186-201, 617-36
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press.

1894

One of MC 's best-known novels appeared: The Daughters of Danaus (the first novel among the selection mentioned in the Times after her death, and reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1989).
In Greek mythology, Danaus ordered his daughters to kill their husbands, and all but one obeyed. Those who had killed were condemned to carry water in sieves, that is, to a task which of its nature is impossible. Critic Ann Heilmann cites differing literary tellings of the myth by Aeschylus and Robert Graves , and argues that Caird also reworks here the Medea myth.
Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester University Press.
215, 223
Caird was probably also aware of the story of the Vestal Virgin Tuccia, who miraculously demonstrated her chastity by successfully carrying water in a sieve (mentioned in Petrarch 's The Triumph of Chastity).
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197

By 16 July 1931

MC 's The Great Wave, which appeared in the year before her death, was a novel with a mystical flavour.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Murphy, Patricia. Time is of the Essence. SUNY Press.
251n3
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
1537 (16 July 1931): 563

4 February 1932

MC died of colon cancer at her London house, 34 Woronzow Road, St John's Wood, aged eighty-one, after more than a decade as a widow.
Forward, Stephanie. “A Study in Yellow: Mona Caird’s ’The Yellow Drawing-Room’”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 2, pp. 295-07.
299
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

24 May 1854

Alice Mona Alison, who later wrote as MC , was born at 34 Pier Street in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. She remained an only child.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.