1. Sarah Grand was an Irish-English feminist writer active from 1873 to 1922.
14 Facts About Sarah Grand
1. 2.
Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House, Donaghadee, County Down, Ireland, of English parents.
3.
Sarah Grand's father was Edward John Bellenden Clarke and her mother was Margaret Bell Sherwood.
4.
Sarah Grand was then sent to a finishing school in Kensington, London.
5.
Sarah Grand and McFall's only child, David Archibald Edward McFall, was born in Sandgate, Kent, on 7 October 1871.
6.
Sarah Grand became an actor and took the name Archie Carlaw Grand.
7.
Sarah Grand turned to writing, but her first novel, Ideala, self-published in 1888, enjoyed limited success and some negative reviews.
8.
Sarah Grand used her experience of suffocation in marriage and the joy of consequent liberation in her fictional depictions of pre-suffrage women with few political rights and options, trapped in oppressive marriages.
9.
Sarah Grand used this knowledge in her 1893 novel The Heavenly Twins, warning of the dangers of syphilis, advocating sensitivity rather than condemnation for the young women infected with this disease.
10.
Sarah Grand established the phrase "New Woman" in a debate with Ouida in 1894.
11.
Sarah Grand lived briefly in London, then, after her husband's sudden death in February 1898, moved to Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where her stepson writer and illustrator, Haldane MacFall came to lodge for several years with her.
12.
When her home was bombed in 1942, Sarah Grand was persuaded to move to Calne in Wiltshire, where she died the following year on 12 May 1943, at age 88.
13.
Sarah Grand is buried in Lansdown Cemetery, Bath, Somerset, alongside her sister, Nellie.
14.
Sarah Grand holds out the hope of marriage as the holiest and perfect state of union between a man and woman, but deplores the inequality and disadvantages intended to keep young women ignorant, and insists that women should rebel against entrapment in a loveless marriage.