Sarah Grand

Description

Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House, Donaghadee, County Down, Northern Ireland of English parents. Her father died in 1862, whereupon her mother took Grand and her siblings back to Bridlington, England to be near her family. In 1868 Grand was sent to the Royal Naval School, Twickenham, but was soon expelled for organizing groups that supported Josephine Butler's protests against the Contagious Diseases Act, which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the sole cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Grand was then sent to a finishing school in Kensington, London. In August 1870, at the age of sixteen, she married widowed Army surgeon David Chambers McFall, who was 23 years her senior and had two sons from his previous marriage. Grand and McFall had only one child. He became an actor and took the name Archie Carlaw Grand. From 1873 to 1878 the family travelled in the Far East, providing Grand with more material for her fiction. In 1879 they moved to Norwich, and in 1881 to Warrington, Lancashire where her husband retired. Upon returning to England, she and her husband became sexually estranged. Grand felt constrained by her marriage. She turned to writing, but her first novel, Ideala, self-published in 1888, enjoyed limited success and some negative reviews. Nevertheless, she trusted in her new career to support her in her decision to leave her husband in 1890 and move to London. She 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. Clarke renamed herself Sarah Grand in 1893 with the publication of her novel The Heavenly Twins. This feminine pen name represented the archetype of the "New Woman" developed by her and her female colleagues. She lived briefly in London, then, after her husband's sudden death in February 1898, moved to Tunbridge Wells, Kent, during which time she took an active part in the local women's suffrage societies, as well as travelling extensively, particularly to the United States on a lecture tour in the wake of the notoriety of her novel The Heavenly Twins. Although it gained her mixed and often angry criticism, her work was well received by notable authors. In 1920 she moved to Crowe Hall at Widcombe in Bath, Somerset where she served from 1922 to 1929 as Lady Mayoress. When her home was bombed in 1942, Grand was persuaded to move to Calne in Wiltshire, where she died the following year on 12 May 1943, a month before her 89th birthday. She is buried in Lansdown Cemetery, Bath, Somerset, alongside her sister, Nellie. Her son Archie outlived her by only a year, dying in a London air raid in 1944.