The short fiction of Sarah Grand: from didactic tales to proto-modernist short stories
Sarah Grand was an Anglo-Irish writer of novels and short stories during the late-nineteenth
century. Her novels The Beth Book and The Heavenly Twins were bestsellers at the time of
their publication. They were reviewed and discussed everywhere, mainly because of their
rather frank treatment of topics such as the sexual double standard, venereal disease and
unhappy marriages. As was the case with many women writers at the time of the fin de siècle,
Grand's works were often considered inartistic because of their explicitly feminist content.
Recently, critics such as Theresa Magnum have used the term middlebrow in an attempt to
reappraise Grand's feminist writings. Yet in approaching Grand's oeuvre as middlebrow,
critics like Magnum suggest that her fiction is primarily if not exclusively interesting on the
level of content. By contrast, other critics such as Ann Heilmann and John Kucic have
approached Grand as a proto-modernist writer and consequently shifted critical attention
towards her formal achievements. I will follow Kucic and Heilmann's line of thought by
focusing on the interaction between Grand's feminist content and her formal techniques.
However, while Heilmann and Kucic have especially focused on Grand's novels, I will draw
attention to her often neglected short stories.
I will compare two short story collections by Sarah Grand, Our Manifold Nature and
Emotional Moments. As I will demonstrate, the first collection is very didactic, accessible and
woman-centered. Grand deploys rhetorical techniques to support her feminist message and
even to stimulate readers to feminist action. These features justify Grand's categorization as
middlebrow. By contrast, the second collection shows a degree of formal and aesthetic
experimentation that is not normally considered middlebrow. The stories have a fragmented
and ambiguous form, which no longer supports but rather disperses Grand's feminist message.
I will show that the formal experiments in Emotional Moments mark out a proto-modernist
style which has contributed to the development of the modern short story.
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Our Manifold Nature: a Transitory Collection
Our Manifold Nature was published in 1894 and contains six short stories that had been
published between 1891 and 1893, in the periodicals Temple Bar and Pall Mall Magazine.
The preface to Our Manifold Nature gives ample information on Grand's conception of
literature. She claims that "fiction has always been held to be at its best when it was true to
life. To be true to life seems, therefore, to be the noblest ambition of an author...Literature
should be like life itself, an unfolding" (8). Grand criticizes fictional texts for being artificial
and emphasizes that her stories really happened. She further announces the stories as 'little
essays' and 'studies that were an experiment'. Not only the preface, but also the title, Our
Manifold Nature, suggests almost scientifically objective stories aimed at rendering the truth
about the human condition. The narrator of 'Eugenia', which is one of the stories in the
collection, proclaims in similar ways that the story will be true to life. The first paragraph of
'Eugenia' reads as follows:
I am a humble artist, studying always in the life school of the world, blinking nothing
that goes to the making or marring of life, more especially to the marring of it, for if
we would make it lovely, we must know exactly the nature of the diseases that
disfigure it, and experiment upon them until we discover the great specific which,
when properly applied, shall remedy all that. And it so happened that, in order to be
accurate in every detail of a work upon which I was then engaged, I required to study
human nature. (113)
The paragraph is saturated with phrases such as 'studying', 'know exactly', 'experiment', and
'accuracy of detail', which suggest detached scientific scrutiny. Significantly, the narrator of
'Eugenia' is gendered female, but her sex is never explicitly mentioned. She also deliberately
avoids to mention her name. Like the scientific discourse, the narrator's gender-neutrality and
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anonymity implies an objective rendering of facts, of life as it is. The apologetic humble in
the first paragraph thus expresses mere false modesty, a traditional rhetorical technique.
Further, the opening paragraph also stands out for its use of medical terms. The narrator sets
out to "remedy the diseases that disfigure life", which suggests a beneficial effect of literature
on life itself. With the medical discourse, the narrator takes on the authoritative role of doctor,
which again extends her reliable and objective stance.
The emphasis on realism, facts and objectivity in the preface to Our Manifold Nature
and in the opening paragraphs of the story 'Eugenia', indicates that Grand refuses to write for
mere aesthetic purposes and aims to use literature as an instrument of education. Grand wants
to educate her readers about -among other things- the sexual double standard and even
stimulate them to feminist action. The short stories in Our Manifold Nature therefore have a
very didactic and almost preaching tone. In the story 'The Yellow Leaf' for example, Grand
uses literature to advocate women's equal educational opportunities. The story is again told by
a female first-person narrator, but it is especially the characters that serve as spokespersons
for Grand's ideas on women's education. Uncle Henry for example, who is one of the few
male characters in 'The Yellow Leaf', criticizes woman's confinement to the private sphere as
follows:
'the woman's-sphere-is-home' woman. A toy, that's what the creature is, an
unreasonable and illogical toy, neither reason nor logic having entered into the
curriculum of that kind of womanly woman, it having been supposed that a large
establishment is most admirably managed by a mistress whose reasoning powers have
never been cultivated. (38)
Uncle Henry is presented as a reliable and wise old man, so his opinions are to be
accepted as true. His words are a typical example of Grand's feminist reasoning. She safely
sticks to the Victorian ideal of motherhood, but she gives it a feminist twist by making good
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motherhood depend on proper education. The end of the 'Yellow Leaf' confirms the story's
central didactic message, as the uneducated female character ends up committing suicide,
whereas the educated women are successful and happy.
At the turn of the century, Grand's explicitly ideological stories were not particularly
welcomed by the literary establishment. As Rita Kranidis argues, "the aesthetic ideology that
became dominant at the time of the fin de siècle negated any connection between life and
literature and opposed feminists' attempts to make public, and to theorize and politicize
women's private lives" (xv). At the time of their publication, Grand's feminist novels and
short stories were therefore very often considered inartistic. A review of Our Manifold
Nature, published in The Bookman (6:32, 1894) illustrates this:
The title here is too big for its contents and the preface much too high-pitched. A great
observer of human kind and its exponent, through the medium of fiction, would have
fought shy of a name suggesting so much...We would respectfully suggest that her
theories of art will be of more value when her achievements are a little more, and
appeal to her to recognize the true direction of her work instead of using the cant of the
day and posing as an 'artist' because she writes stories. The great success of 'The
Heavenly Twins' was a fact full of significance, ...but its success had nothing to do
with artistic reasons...Some of it was certainly due to the fact of Madame Grand's
distinct capacities for stimulating and leading popular opinion.
First of all, the reviewer deems the stories unworthy of the 'high-pitched' tone of the
preface and the title. This critique might have been influenced by Victorian gender ideology,
as it was unusual for women's issues to be given such weight. Moreover, the authoritative
stance of the preface and of the narrators in the stories was considered appropriate for men,
not for women. Secondly, the reviewer ascribes the lack of artistic value in Grand's work to
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her commercial success and popularity, which is in fact an extra-textual factor. Theresa
Magnum indicates that Grand indulged in that celebrity status with interviews and
photographs in magazines, which has certainly contributed to the decrease of her cultural
capital. Further in the review, the author mentions a third reason for the lack of artistic value
in Grand's stories, namely the fact that they are too excessively moralizing. Many other critics
also seem to be troubled by Grand's preachy tone. Inspired by the aesthetic ideal of l'art pour
l'art, fin de siècle literary critics often assumed that art and ideology could not co-exist. In
sum, gender issues, commercial factors and the aesthetic ideology of the fin de siècle
conspired to prevent Grand's work from reaching a high literary status.
Grand's conflict with the idea of l'art pour l'art, and more specifically with its practitioners, the
aesthetes and decadents, also surfaces in her fiction. In the story 'Eugenia', the conflict is
personified by the main characters. The narrator of 'Eugenia' tells the story of Lord
Brinkhampton, a bankrupt society man who holds some very conventional ideas about
women. He meets the beautiful and rich Eugenia and sets out to marry her. Yet Brinkhampton
is soon deemed unsuitable as a husband by the advanced New Woman Eugenia. This is
because Brinkhampton is the decadent figure par excellence, which of course already appears
from his external description:
It was evident from the way he was dressed that the matter had cost him some thought,
but no care could conceal the 'used-up' look about his eyes, nor produce a deceptive
tinge of health on the opaque sallow of his cheeks...it is only a fresh and healthy skin
that really takes paint and powder well...but a casual acquaintance would never have
expected flabby muscular tissue discounted by alcohol (6).
The narrator's description of Brinkhampton's decadent looks contains a negative
evaluation of his character. His "discounted" constitution is brought about by alcohol, which
is suggestive of immoral behaviour. Compared to Brinkhampton, the character Eugenia is
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portrayed in a very positive way, again through linking her external features to moral
qualities:
One could not help calculating what the nerve-power must be behind such ease, and
what the strength of the sinews which were masked by her ivory skin...Her ripe red
lips were slightly parted in a smile showing the white teeth between...one could trace
the course of the blue veins beneath the transparent skin (26).
Beauty and moral strength are subtly interwoven in the association of ivory skin with
strong sinews, and in the link between transparent skin and healthy blood. Eugenia is clearly
Brinkhampton's moral superior. Throughout the story, the narrator also dwells on Eugenia's
connection to nature, which sets her apart from the artificial Brinkhampton. The description of
Brinkhampton bespeaks Grand's rejection of the artificiality and immorality of decadent art.
As Ann Heilmann points out "the competing aesthetics of feminist and decadent art inscribed
into Grand's works are...constructed as a clash between women's higher moral values and
men's sexual and social failings".
As the excerpts from 'Eugenia' and 'The Yellow Leaf' have illustrated, Our Manifold Nature is
completely dominated by Grand's feminist agenda. With accessible and domestic stories,
Grand pursues the self-improvement and education of middle-class women. Nineteenth
century critics were right about her didacticism, but that is of course no reason to reject the
collection as inartistic. It is striking that some recent feminist critics of Grand do not differ all
that much from late nineteenth century reviewers, as they also assume that ideological and
didactic content precludes aesthetic value. Theresa Magnum for example describes Grand as a
"firmly middlebrow writer primarily engaged on an educational project aiming to introduce
moderately feminist ideas to married, non-militant, middle-class women". Magnum uses the
term middlebrow to revalue the subversive feminist contents of Grand's works, but at the
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same time, 'middlebrow' implies an undervaluation of the formal aspects of the stories.
Formal and aesthetic aspects are indeed very often overlooked in studies that approach stories
as middlebrow. My analysis of Our Manifold Nature has shown that Grand's rhetorical and
narratological strategies do have value, though they do not comply with the dominant
aesthetic standard of modernism, which values features such as ambiguity and ruptured
linearity. In the final part of this paper I will focus on Grand's second short story collection
Emotional Moments, which is less explicitly didactic and feminist than Our Manifold Nature.
In fact, in her second collection, Grand seems more preoccupied with form than content.
These stories do deploy formal features that form part of the modernist aesthetic, such as
ambiguity and fragmentation. While formal aspects supported Grand's feminist content in Our
Manifold Nature, the formal experiments in Emotional Moments generate a more ambivalent
moral message.
Emotional Moments: proto-modernist Grand
Emotional Moments was published in 1908. It contains twelve short stories, some of which
were published in periodicals between 1894 and 1904. The title of the collection, and the titles
of stories such as 'An Emotional Moment' and 'A New Sensation', announce Grand's move
towards a more condensed and psychological mode of narration, in other words, to a mode of
narration that typifies the modern short story. In the preface to the collection, Grand also
adopts a different tone from that of Our Manifold Nature. The stories are now described as
'little stories' rather than 'little essays', and, according to Grand, they were written in 'days of
hurry and hustle' (6). Compared to the rather lengthy 'studies' of Our Manifold Nature, these
stories are indeed very condensed. What is more, rather than maintaining that the stories
'unfold like life itself', Grand describes her creative act as 'moulding impressions into shape'
(6). She thus moves from a passive and neutral recording of facts to an active and subjective
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creating, which again announces proto-modernist stories. In sum, Grand's urge to educate the
reader has diminished. Being true to life is no longer her priority.
The stories in Emotional Moments are formally much more experimental than those of
Our Manifold Nature. Many stories begin in medias res and skip the elaborate introductions
and descriptions of characters and historical background that were so prominent in Our
Manifold Nature. Moreover, whereas the authoritative narrators in Our Manifold Nature make
a fixed distinction between right and wrong, the stories in Emotional Moments exude more
ambiguity. The moral message, if there is one, remains ambivalent. This first of all results
from Grand's experiments with narrative voice. Many stories in Emotional Moments contain
embedded narratives. The short story 'An Emotional Moment' for example features a thirdperson narration in which a female character functions as embedded narrator and tells her
story to a male interlocutor. The third-person narrator provides no guiding or moralistic
comments about the woman's story. The voice of the embedded female narrator also differs
very much from that of the female first-person narrators in Our Manifold Nature. She does
not take on an authoritative voice, but narrates with obvious uncertainty and hesitation: "She
stopped short, and it was with difficulty that s he resumed...Her colour rose, her breath caught
as if she had plunged into cold water, her voice broke on certain words, and she hurried on in
gasps". The reference to the woman's colour, breath and voice suggests a very bodily kind of
storytelling, which is opposed to the disembodiment and the scientific tone of the narrators in
Our Manifold Nature. As the excerpt illustrates, Grand focuses more on the act of narration
itself than on the contents of the story. Style thus becomes more important than the moral
message of the content. This preoccupation with the form is illustrative of the proto-modernist
turn in Grand's short fiction.
Ambiguity is also established through experiments with focalization. The female
protagonist of 'An Emotional Moment' recounts to her lover the story of a previous affair. She
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describes her consuming and self-destructive passion for the man, which nevertheless
disappeared as soon as her love was requited. Her present lover therefore criticizes her for
being flirtatious and a coquette. Because of the non-intrusive third-person narrator, the story is
very ambiguous as to which character provides the right moral voice: on the one hand, the
woman's self-absorption does really make her seem morally depraved, on the other hand, the
man's conservative longing for a noble and pure woman makes him blind to her individuality
and desires. The last scene of the story further extends this ambiguous morality. When the
man decides to leave the woman on account of her immorality, she reacts as follows: "she
threw herself back in her chair, and laughed - a horrid, hard, hysterical laugh; but her face was
contorted with pain. He heard the laugh; but the pain - he neither saw nor suspected" (14).
The woman's laugh seems to confirm the man's stereotypical conception of her as morally
diseased. However, this might also be an instance of internal focalization, which renders the
man's limited interpretation of the laugh. As a result, were are never sure how to interpret the
woman's laugh nor how to judge her character. In addition, the laugh is echoed in the
threefold repetition of the h in 'horrid hard, hysterical', which again points out that Grand's
focus has moved from the contents to the style. The condensed and ambiguous stories and the
narratological experiments bring Grand's Emotional Moments close to the modern short story
that emerged in Britain from the fin de siècle onwards.
A possible reason why Grand's stories lost their didactic and feminist intent is that Grand had
found other platforms for the expression of her political ideas. From 1900 onwards, Grand's
fictional output decreased, as she was mainly engaged in social and political action. She
became a popular public lecturer and was a leading member of various suffrage societies. By
the time Emotional Moments was published, she had communicated her feminist ideas all
over the world. A second reason might be that she was inspired by her contemporary George
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Egerton, who published her two experimental short story collections Keynotes and Discords
right before Grand started writing the stories that would compile Emotional Moments. The
often sensual and subjective tone of Egerton's stories indeed returns in for example 'An
Emotional Moment', where the embedded female narrator is rather explicit about her sexual
desires. Moreover, Grand's stories 'The Butcher's Wife' and 'The Rector's Bane' recall
Egerton's naturalistic stories about the lower classes. The lower classes become the central
voices in Emotional Moments, while in Our Manifold Nature, they were still seen through the
eyes of the superior middle-class. Not only Egerton, but also other women writers who
published their sometimes experimental short stories in the avant-garde periodical The Yellow
Book might have served as a source of inspiration for Grand.
Conclusion
Focusing on her novels, feminist critics have described Sarah Grand as a middlebrow writer,
who is intent on passing on her feminist message to a mass readership of middle-class
women. This assumption is correct, though the label middlebrow should not lead critics to
overlook the formal and aesthetic aspects of Grand's work. Feminist critics thereby replicate
the 19th century assumption that ideology and art cannot coexist. My analysis of Grand's
short story collections has shown that her formal achievements are also worth studying.
Focusing on formal aspects, I was able to trace Grand's evolution from traditional rhetorical
strategies that support her feminist message, to innovative formal experiments which occur in
stories that raise feminist issues in a more questioning manner.
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