Mona Caird
Mona Caird, born Alice Mona Alison on May 24, 1854, was a British novelist and radical feminist known for her outspoken views on women's rights and marriage. Originally from the Isle of Wight, she spent much of her life in London and had a brief marriage to farmer James Henryson-Caird, with whom she had one son. Caird authored eight novels and various essays, utilizing both her real name and the pseudonym G. Noel Hatton. Her works often explored themes of marriage, women's autonomy, and societal oppression, with her most notable novel being *The Daughters of Danaus* (1894), which has seen a resurgence in interest.
Caird gained significant attention for her provocative 1888 article "Marriage," published in the *Westminster Review*, where she characterized marriage as akin to slavery and a form of prostitution. This piece sparked widespread debate, reflecting her ability to challenge societal norms and advocate for women's rights to control their own bodies and divorce laws. In addition to her literary contributions, Caird was engaged in various social causes, including the campaign against vivisection, though she remained distanced from the suffragette movement. Despite her initial impact, Caird's influence declined significantly after 1915, and she passed away in 1932, largely forgotten by the literary world.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Mona Caird
Writer
- Born: May 24, 1854
- Birthplace: Isle of Wight
- Died: February 4, 1932
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Mona Caird was born Alice Mona Alison on May 24, 1854, to John Alison, a Scottish inventor, engineer, and landowner, and Matilda Ann Hector, a young woman of Danish origin. Caird was born on the Isle of Wight, England, but most of her childhood was spent in London, where her parents eventually moved. As a child, she wrote plays and stories. In 1877, she married James Alexander Henryson- Caird, a farmer from Galloway, a region in southwestern Scotland. She seems to have spent only a few months of the year in Scotland, preferring to live in London or travel abroad because of her poor health. The couple’s son, Alister James Caird, was born in 1884.
Caird wrote eight novels, a number of short stories, and a number of controversial essays as a radical feminist. Her first two novels, When Nature Leadeth (1883), and One That Wins (1887), were published under the pseudonym of G. Noel Hatton, but the others were published under her own name. Each novel deals with issues of marriage, women’s rights to control their own bodies, or women’s suppression in male- dominated societies. For example, in the somewhat melodramatic The Wing of Azrael (1889), Victoria Sedley, the protagonist, murders her husband to end a violent marriage. She flees, but has to reject her lover because of the harm association with her would do him. In A Romance of the Moors (1891) there is a much gentler diffusion of feminist ideas; Bessie, the naïve heroine, needs educating and maturing in her true nature as a woman. Probably her most famous novel is The Daughters of Danaus (1894), which is the one novel to be recently republished, most of the others having sunk into obscurity and the neglect that has overtaken much of Caird’s fiction.
One of Caird’s short stories, “The Yellow Drawing- Room” (1890), has also recently been reexamined by feminist literary critics who have found her ideas to be strikingly consonant with modern feminist analyses. Caird attacks the contemporary psychiatric notion that women who shun motherhood become mentally unstable and threaten the well-being of the race.
Besides being a fiction writer, Caird made herself knowledgeable in anthropology and history, becoming influenced by Victorian thinkers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer as well as Charles Darwin. She moved in the literary circle of Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds and knew writer Olive Schreiner. She also moved on the fringes of several women’s rights groups.
In fact, Caird received her greatest notoriety from an article published in the August, 1888, issues of the Westminster Review, entitled simply “Marriage.” Here she describes marriage as “a vexatious failure,” a form of slavery, likening it to prostitution, where women’s bodies no longer belong to themselves. The article generated a major debate, with one national newspaper alone receiving 27,000 letters about it. Caird wrote additional articles and essays in such prestigious magazines as North American Review, Fortnightly Review, and Nineteenth Century; these articles were collected and published in 1897 as The Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women. Caird’s argument in support of women’s rights goes beyond equality of the sexes to the freedom of women to own their bodies in childbearing and to negotiate their own terms of marriage; she views marraige as a private contract, requiring no interference whatsoever from the state. Caird only desires state interference in areas of child rearing. She also sought a loosening of the divorce laws. Unlike earlier feminists, Caird’s opinions found receptive ears, even though other women often found her views too radical or revolutionary. She was even accused of hating men.
Caird became involved in the campaign against vivisection and wrote several books on the topic in 1895 and 1897. She also participated in the temperance and free speech movements. However, she kept out of the suffragette movement, perhaps seeing this still within the orbit of male power. After 1915, she wrote only one novel, and her influence waned steadily until, by the time of her death, she was almost a forgotten figure. She died from colon cancer in London in 1932.