Born: 10 June 1854, United Kingdom
Died: 12 May 1943
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Sarah Grand, Frances McFall
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Frances Clakre. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Clarke (McFall), Frances Bellenden (Sarah Grand) (1854–1943), novelist and feminist, was born 10 June 1854 at Donaghadee, Co. Down, where her father, Edward Bellenden Clarke, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was stationed in the coastguard. Her mother was Margaret (née Bell Sherwood). Frances was the fourth of five children, and the family moved to Mayo when she was a small child, but after the death of her father in 1861, they moved to Yorkshire, where her mother had grown up. Until the age of fourteen, she was educated at home; she was then sent to the Royal Navy school at Twickenham, and then to a finishing school in Holland Road, Kensington. She profoundly shocked the school authorities by starting a club in support of Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, an initiative which suggests that, for a Victorian schoolgirl, she was unusually precocious and radical.
On 23 August 1870 she married David Chambers McFall (1834/5–1898), a surgeon in the Indian army who was originally from Magherafelt, Co. Derry. A widower with two sons, he was more than twenty years her senior. They had one son the year they were married, David Archibald Edward (Archie), who later became an actor. She established a good relationship with her stepsons, Haldane and Albert, but the marriage had been a strategic move to ensure her education and was not a success. With their son, the couple travelled widely in the Far East for several years, before returning to England in 1879. Her first publication, Two dear little feet, appeared in 1873 and attacked the contemporary fashion for tight boots. But it was with her novel Ideala, a study from life that she began to reach a wider audience. Although it was written in 1879, she finally published it herself in 1888 after many rejections. Its success allowed her to leave McFall and live independently in London from 1890.
Her best-known and most controversial work, The heavenly twins (1893), was published under her pseudonym Sarah Grand, which she had decided to use in all aspects of her public life. Though the three-volume work was confusing and prolix, its subject matter ensured that it became an immediate success, and it was reprinted six times in its first year. As a sensational best-seller, it drew her to the attention of Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. In the novel, Grand openly attacked Victorian sexual morality and especially double standards. She endorsed the need to recognise women’s rights, especially in the context of health and education. Graphic descriptions of the devastating symptoms of syphilis in women and children highlighted the author’s furious denunciation of men who infected their wives with the disease. The Beth book (1897), her most autobiographical novel, was not as successful but includes fictionalised accounts of her early childhood in Ireland and of a failing marriage.
Initially more moderate than militant, the success of Heavenly twins inaugurated a new life for her as a lecturer and authority on women’s issues. She also contributed articles and short stories to women’s magazines in both America and Britain, was frequently interviewed by journalists aware of her radical views on eugenics and sexuality, and undertook several lengthy and successful lecture tours on a range of women’s issues. The oversized hats of ‘Madame Grand’ became a distinctive feature, and she also advocated cycling. Acquainted with George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, she was hailed by Shaw as a misunderstood genius. On a highly successful lecture tour of the US in 1901, she stayed with Mark Twain in Connecticut.
Following the death of her husband in 1898, she became very active in the suffrage movement and lectured extensively throughout England from 1903 to 1912. She joined the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, and was president of the local branch of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies in Tunbridge Wells, where she met Katherine Tynan. After women received the vote in 1918 her reputation waned, and two later novels, Adnam’s orchard (1912) and The winged victory (1916), with their drawn-out, proselytising style, were not successful. In 1920 she moved to Bath, Somerset (as was), where she served as mayoress of the city from 1922 to 1929, acting on ceremonial occasions as partner to the mayor Cedric Chivers. In her last years she lived with her stepson Haldane, an artist, in Tunbridge Wells. Having left Bath in 1942 after the bombings, she moved to nearby Calne in Wiltshire, where she died on 12 May 1943.
Though seen to epitomise the ‘new woman’ of the 1890s (she was credited with coining the phrase), her reputation went into decline toward the end of the suffrage era, and by the time of her death her books were long out of print. Feminist critics and historians in the later twentieth century rediscovered her work, some of which has been republished. Her portrait in oils, painted in 1896 by A. Praga, hangs in the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath.