MONA
CAIRD
Vita Alice Mona ALISON
(1852-1932)
Alice Mona Henryson
Caird
Novelist, essayist, critic,
social reformer, ardent campaigner against vivisection, Mona Caird believed
that marriage led many women into a virtual slavery, limiting their destiny and
subordinating them to their partners.
She became widely known after 1888 for advocating change in the marriage
laws to grant women greater equality and more freedom. She warned of the dangers of the
authoritarian mix of eugenics and social dictatorship that was to emerge in the
next century:
“the
danger, the evil and the unsurmountable vice of
absolute power”.
Mona Caird (née Mona Alison, also called Alice Mona
Henryson-Caird) (1854-1932) was a Scottish novelist and essayist whose feminist
views sparked controversy in the late years of the 19th century. Her publications included Whom Nature Leadeth (1883),
The Wings of Azrael (1889), Beyond the
Pale: An Appeal on Behalf of the Victims of Vivisection (1897), The
Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman
(1897). Mona Caird's
friend Elizabeth A. Sharp stressed that though her writings about marriage had
met acute hostility, they did a great deal to alter public attitudes on women’s
rights.
She was
born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, daughter of the 40-year-old John Alison,
Midlothian inventor of vertical boilers and retorts, and the 19-year-old
Matilda Ann Jane Hector. Too little is known about her parents. Mona’s father
may have hailed from Portobello or Duddingston. In amassing a substantial
fortune he undoubtedly spent some of his life in Australia. Mona’s young mother was born in
Sleswig-Holstein, in those days part of Denmark, Whether she was related to the
Edinbugh legal and trading Hectors (like the surveyor of New Zealand and
Canada, Sir James Hector of Kicking Horse fame) remains uncertain. Mona wrote stories and plays beginning in her
early childhood, and was at ease in French and German as well as English. She
published her first novel, Lady Hetty, anonymously in 1875.
After the Isle of Wight, Mona’s family moved on the strength of John
Alison’s landholdings and investments, spending some time at Gatton Road,
Reigate in Surrey during her early school years. Later, the family moved
comfortably to take their place in central London at 90 Lancaster Gate, now the
Thistle Hyde Park Hotel.
In 1877, Mona Alison married farmer James Alexander Caird, the oldest son
of eight children of the well-known agronomist of the day, Sir James Caird
FRS. Mona’s father-in-law was a few
years younger than her own father. Sir James had been active in politics as MP
for Dartmouth 1857-9, and the Stirling Boroughs 1859-65, later becoming a
member of the Inclosure Commission, of the Board of Agriculture, and a Privy
Councillor. Sir James was a widower,
his wife Margaret Henryson, a distant descendant of the Scots poet, died in
Nice in 1863 after twenty years of marriage.
Sir James and his famiy came from Wigtownshire, and his own landholding in
that county, at Casencary, he had purchased after his name as an agronomist was
well-known. James Alexander Caird,
Mona’s new husband, had been given charge of the farm management of the estate
of about 2000 acres from empty moors to the lines of stakenets along the Cree
estuary. The fourteenth century mansion
was an oddly romantic range of buildings, notable for its two libraries, and as
“Woodbourne” had been used by Sir Walter Scott as a setting for his
novel Guy Mannering.
So on
The 1880s were the years of Mona Caird’s ascendancy. As a married woman, houseguest and hostess from
her parent’s base in Lancaster Gate, she associated with a wide circle in the
literary and social world of the time. A
generation before Bloomsbury, its way of life first began to take shape around
Hyde Park where the future Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell and Virginia
Woolf might be seen in their
perambulators. With no real court influence in the decades of Queen Victoria’s
withdrawal from society after Prince Albert’s death in 1861 the social life of
London had come to be led by a series of society hostesses. Old aristocracy,
intelligence, colonial money, industrial wealth and political power rubbed
shoulders in conversation, ideas, gossip and wit.
One of the leading hostesses of the day -just a few years older than Mona
Caird- was the energetic and well connected Mary Lady Jeune, active in social
issues through the Primrose League. Through Lady Jeune and others, Mona became
a member of literary and political circles and expanded her knowledge of the humanities
and science. Thomas Hardy regularly dined at Lady Jeune’s (staying there when
in London) and was soon an admirer of Mona Caird’s work and ideas.
Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 admired her work
In 1883 Mona Caird published the first of two novels, Whom Nature
Leadeth (1883) under the name "G. Noel Hatton", but these
were hardly noticed. In 1884 the Cairds
had their first and only child, Alister James.
With due allowance for her new role as a mother, Mona continued to
divide her time between London, Cassencary, and travel, between parents,
husband and son, but generally leading an independent, intellectually
stimulating life. Her marriage continued
unspectacularly until James Alexander (once unkindly referred to as “No-one
Caird”) died in 1921.
After One That Wins (1887) was published under the name of Hatton,
Mona Caird’s next writings were published in her own name, a name that suddenly
came to prominence in 1888 when the Westminster Review printed her long
article "Marriage".
The
In the
Westminster Review, Mona Caird was passionate about the indignities women
had to suffer in marriage. The relative responsibilities of the sexes in
marriage were demonstrably unfair. She called its present state a
"vexatious failure" and advocated the equality and autonomy of
marriage partners. The widely circulated Daily Telegraph responded with
a syndicated series of its own: "Is Marriage a Failure?" which
ran for three months and brought it thousands of letters from around the
world. Disturbed that her views had been
misunderstood and sensationalised, Mona Caird published another Westminster
Review article on "Ideal Marriage" at the end of the
year. In it she looked forward to the
day when “a mother’s affection will show itself, not in industrious self-sacrifice,
which reduces her to a pulpy nonentity, and generally ends in bringing a child
to a similar condition ; but in a resolve to take the full advantage of all
that science is busily providing for those who will accept her bounties.”
Essays
on The Emancipation of the Family came out in 1890: "Meanwhile,
the spirit of liberty among women is increasing rapidly, and as soon as an
approach to economic independence gives them the power to refuse, without harsh
penalty, the terms which men have hitherto been able to dictate to them, in and
out of marriage, we shall have some just right to call ourselves a free
people. It is then that marriage -at
present a mere moldering branch of the patriarchal tree- must alter its nature
and form”
“The
'contract' can no longer remain unequal, when women have some say in the making
of laws which they have to obey, and it remains to be seen how tight and
irrevocable men will be willing to make the bond which they, too, must
literally carry out”
“In
short, so amazing, so overwhelming are the demands made upon the woman, and so
meager the rights granted to her, that the sense of the stupendous injustice is
almost swallowed by the sense of the stupendous absurdity, and -as fortunately
often happens in the study of English law and English opinion- the stress of
indignant feeling finds timely relief in a burst of laughter."
"Equal
rights for the two sexes; the economic independence of women (hanging in a
great measure on the progress of our industrial evolution); the establishment,
rapid or gradual, as may prove desirable, of real freedom in the home- this at
last would bring us to the end of the patriarchal system. May we speed the parting guest!"
Mona
Caird’s “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” followed in 1892. The
pieces she wrote on marriage and women's issues in these years were collected
together in 1897 in “The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status
and Destiny of Women”.
At the
same time, Mona Caird had continued to express herself through fiction. In the
aftermath of the Westminster Review articles she published her next
novel “The Wing of Azrael” in 1889 under her own name. It includes
marital rape, and Viola Sedley murders her cruel husband in self-defence. A
short story collection followed in 1891: “A Romance of the Moors”. In
the title story, a widowed artist, Margaret Ellwood, advises a young couple to
lead independent and self-sufficient lives. In her well known short story "The
Yellow Drawing-Room" of 1892 Vanora Haydon defies traditional notions
of separate spheres for men and women.
Mona Caird’s best-known novel “Daughters of Danaus” appeared in
1894. In it Hadria Fullerton hopes to
become a composer, but finds herself hemmed in by the family duties expected of
her as a woman to her parents, husband and child.
Daughters of Danaus -a modern
edition
Behind
all her writings, Mona Caird had been continuously pressing for votes for
women, from her beginnings in the movement as a member of the National
Society for Women's Suffrage to the Women's Franchise League, the Women's
Emancipation Union, and the London Society for Women's Suffrage. Her
essay "Why Women Want the Franchise" was read at the 1892 WEU
Conference. In 1908 she published "Militant Tactics and Woman's
Suffrage" and took part in the second Hyde Park demonstration.
She
was also an increasingly active opponent of vivisection, writing extensively on
the subject, including "The Sanctuary Of Mercy" which appeared
in 1895. In "Beyond the Pale" published by William Reeves in
1896 she wrote: “…So that in civilised countries, at the present day, only
the animals remain completely below the line; but they seem to be sinking even
lower, to be pushed farther away from human mercy and protection, as the desire
to further the interests of humanity increases. Our luckless dumb companions
are doomed to suffer increasingly at the hands of man, who claims to be their
moral superior, and proceeds to prove this superiority by torture and
mutilation.”
The
question she posed in Beyond the Pale: "Does anyone really
believe that our race must seek its redemption in torture, its health and
happiness by the infliction of anguish unspeakable?" she developed in
her play "The Logicians: An episode in dialogue" in 1902,
where the characters argue opposing views on vivisection.
Mona Caird was a member of the Theosophical Society between 1904 and 1909.
She saw her life energised by twin engines of love and intelligence. For years
she had warned of the dangers of a totalitarian, male-dominated approach to eugenics
by the few, and -worse still- of its passive acceptance by the many. The popular writings of Grant Allen and H.G.
Wells and were not to her taste, with their implied approval of women's
subordination to the collective purpose of mass-produced, state-controlled
motherhood.
Grant Allen (1848-1899)
H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
She
published a large illustrated volume of on Romantic Cities Of Provence
in 1906, but her thoughts were never far from women’s increasingly militant struggle
for the vote. She wrote approvingly in a
special women’s suffrage supplement of the New Age in 1911 “These militant
measures have, I think, brilliantly succeeded in bringing the subject in a few
short years into the region of practical and immediate questions. The public
has been forced at least to attend to the matter. Previously it was ignored,
except by a few thinkers, and even these placed it in the category of the
unessentials. Every other question had to come first. We have had to make enemies
in order to make friends. How far all the militant measures are justifiable is
a different question, and not one to go into here. But it must be remembered
that many things are justified to those who are politically weaponless
-especially when they have patiently tried and tried quieter measures for
nearly half a century -which would be unpardonable in those who possess
political representation either as a class or as a sex. Alternatives are indeed difficult to suggest
for weaponless fighters. Election work seems to offer the best hope, in unison
with propagandist effort. But this has
already been done on a large scale. Still further concentration in this
direction might be perhaps advisable. The difficulty in all these measures
(other than the sensationally militant methods) is that they do not make much
quick effect beyond their immediate radius of effort. The papers will not
report the quieter kind of work. They want something exciting; something to
enable the British householder to denounce “these disgraceful women,’’ and to
suggest mediaeval methods for suppressing them. One newspaper actually stated
frankly that it was not possible to give space to report quiet meetings and
educational work which the public took no interest in. It was only militancy that
was worth reporting. Yet women are urged to try quiet and constitutional
measures as if this were to them quite a new idea! If they don’t make a noise they are told they
obviously don’t want the franchise; if they do make a noise they are told they
are not fit for it! Many no doubt have been alienated by militancy, but in any
case the cause would never have made an inch of progress by the help of those
who held it so cheaply and understood it so little as to be turned aside
because some of its advocates adopted measures which these luke-warm friends
happened (rightly or wrongly) to disapprove.”
For
over a decade the Caird surname Mona was known by in London had differed from
the Henryson-Caird name the rest of the family had now adopted and to which she
deferred at Cassencary. After old Sir James’s death in 1892 his children and
grandchildren had become Henryson-Caird to belatedly honour their maternal
connection. Mona continued to write as Mrs Caird. Her brother-in-law Robert Henryson-Caird was
prominent on the Board of Management of the London Homeopathic Hospital in
Great Ormond Street since 1904. He became Chairman of the hospital’s House
Committee from 1908, and supervised the building of the new wing and nurses’
home in the years that followed.
In a
late novel “The Stones Of Sacrifice” in 1915 Mona Caird wrote of the bad
results which come from women’s self-sacrifice. She herself was not the “pulpy
nonenity” she’d feared seeing others become, but a woman who had led an
intellectually stimulating life. Her ideas about sexual equality were finally
gaining acceptance and could be celebrated with other emancipated women in the
Sesame, Pioneer and Lyceum Clubs to which she belonged. But at Cassencary that same year she was also
Mrs Henryson Caird. As a wife and mother
she regretted the death of local Private Robert Anderson of the King's Own
Scottish Borderers, drowned in the Aegean Sea, age 20 when his troopship was
sunk on the way to Gallipoli. The Kirkcudbrightshire Advertiser reported: “The
death of this young soldier has brought many letters of sympathy to his father
and mother. Among these are two from Mr and Mrs Henryson-Caird of Cassencary,
and their son, Captain A.J. Henryson-Caird. Mr Henryson-Caird says he and Mrs
Henryson-Caird can never forget the deep debt of gratitude they owed to the
deceased soldier for what he did towards saving the life of their son at the
time of the Solway boating accident (when the "Sirius" was burned).
They felt very much for Mr and Mrs Anderson, and offered their sincerest
sympathy.”
Ann
Heilmann of the University of Bradford, in her "Mona Caird (1854-1932):
wild woman, new woman, and early radical feminist critic of marriage and
motherhood" points out some of these strains and paradoxes in her
life: “Judging from her critique of motherhood in her writings, she must
have faced considerable difficulties with taking up a maternal role in her
life. Whether the nervous breakdown she seems to have suffered sometime in the
early 1890s resulted from an overwhelming sense of conflicting desires and
duties, can only be surmised. Not surprisingly, she was not considered to be a
good mother. There are pictures of father and son; none of mother and
child. Her son's bedroom, although
charmingly organised, was situated at the opposite end of the mansion - in the
guest wing. One of the few anecdotes the family remembers about her is that
when her son left for the First World War, she presented him with a phial of
poison, urging him to swallow it in case of injury or captivity. What from her
anti-militaristic and fiercely realistic perspective may well have been
intended as a last resort against horrific suffering, was interpreted as the
ultimate gesture of cynical indifference. Alister James did not follow his
mother's advice and returned from the war as a major, albeit with substantial
injuries. The frail and timid-looking child had developed into a man who stood
for the exact opposite of everything his mother represented. She forbade her
gamekeeper to set traps and snares; her son's one professed interest was
shooting...” Mona’s husband died in
1921. Ann Heilmann comments “Whether she regretted her choice of partner
must remain open to speculation. Acquaintances of the couple may have held the
belief, voiced by one, that because James was "a most unassertive
person", their marriage must have been "happy enough". A
family anecdote records that at a dinner party a guest once stated that while
everybody was aware of what Mrs Caird thought about marriage, Mr Caird's views were
sadly unknown. Significantly, his answer has not been handed down. Caird's fiction provides the only clues to
the existence of marital problems in her life. In her novels, she provided a
brilliantly prosaic script for marital breakdown: simple incompatibility, all
the more tragic for its banality.”
Mona
Caird’s last work, “The Great Wave” appeared in 1931. It is a social
science fiction in which she warns against the racist policies of negative
eugenics, and their too ready acceptance by modern women with votes at their
disposal. In her novel the male
eugenicists plan and manage their marriages in strict accord with reproductive
purposes, advocate the vivisection of animals and "lower" humans such
as criminals and rule their immediate circle of supporters just as
autocratically as they propose to govern state affairs. And despite their overt misogyny, they have a
huge female following. Prophetic to the last, Mona Caird died at Hampstead in
1932.
“It is only
by love, led by knowledge, that the world can be saved. We are all actors in this great and
mysterious tragedy, and our hope is in each other.” –Mona Caird 1888
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