Mona Alice Caird
Mona Alice Caird (1854-1932) was one of the foremost New Women novelists of the 1890s. Ironically, given her distaste for the institution of marriage, little is known about her life before her marriage in 1877 to James Alexander Henryson-Caird, owner of the large estate of Cassencary, near Dumfries. Leaving her husband at Cassencary, Caird spent much of her time in London, where she became active in the suffrage movement as a member of the Women’s Franchise League, the Women’s Emancipation Union, and the London Society for Women’s Suffrage.
Caird published her first two novels, neither of which was successful, under the name G. Noel Hatton. She acquired overnight renown in August 1888 when The Westminster Review published her article “Marriage,” which initiated a debate carried out in the pages of The Daily Telegraph concerning the question, “Is Marriage a Failure?” Roughly 27,000 people responded in writing to Caird’s contentions that the institution of marriage had outlasted its historical utility and that it stifled any possibility of individual liberty; and the debate only ceased when The Daily Telegraph refused to accept any more letters. Caird also figured prominently in the “Wild Women” debates of 1891-2, in which she responded to critics of fin-de-siécle feminism by arguing that women could achieve moral liberty only through economic independence. Her many essays on marriage and women’s issues written between 1888 and 1894 were published in a collection called The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women in 1897.
The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Caird’s best known novel, reveals the influence of John Stuart Mill’s writings on liberty, as its Scottish protagonist Hadria struggles to reconcile individual liberty with gendered social duties. Hadria, an aspiring composer and musician, who must sacrifice her artistic impulses to the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, experiences conflicts that Caird herself may have endured as a writer, wife, and mother.
Bibliography
Ann Heilmann, “Mona Caird (1854-1932): wild woman, new woman, and early radical feminist critic of marriage and motherhood,” Women’s History Review 5.1 (2006), pp. 67-95.