The Eugenization of Love: Sarah Grand and the Morality of Genealogy

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (2: 164)

The term “New Woman,” which the novelist and social purist Sarah Grand (1854–1943) claimed to have invented in 1894,¹ covers a variety of forms of femininity which were brought to public attention in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The extent to which the New Woman was a social reality was fiercely debated in the periodical press, but she entered the world of fiction with considerable impact. Between 1883 and 1900 over a hundred novels were written by or about her (Ardis, New Women 4). As one piqued commentator declared in the Westminster Review, “it is not possible to ride by road or rail, to read a review, a magazine or a newspaper, without being continually reminded of the subject which lady-writers love to call the Woman Question.” He wondered, too, about “women’s pictures, women’s plays, women’s books. What is it that makes them temporarily so successful, and eternally so wanting?” (Sykes 396–97). In the words of W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, “the novel of the Modern Woman is one of the most notable and significant features of the fiction of the day. The Modern Woman novel is not merely a novel written about women, but it is a novel written by a woman about women from the standpoint of woman” (64). For the anti-feminist Eliza Lynn Linton, the New Woman was anti-social; for the publisher and essayist Arthur Waugh, the undoing of aesthetics; for Sarah Grand, she was (or ought to be) a model of civic virtue. What these competing definitions of the New Woman have in common is her apparent newness, her autonomy and her determination to set her own agenda in developing an alternative vision of the future.

Silenced for the best part of the twentieth century, New Woman voices have formed the focus of increasing scholarly debate in the last two decades, a focus which has seen them acclaimed by many as unadulteratedly feminist. Many of these critical appraisals, characterized by current anti-essentialist thinking, present New Woman texts as aesthetically and politically radical.² In what follows I will locate the New Woman more securely in her historical context, arguing in particular that she had her own agenda of eugenic feminism, the central goal of which was the construction of civic motherhood.³ In the only scholarly study to date devoted to Grand’s work, Teresa Mangum identifies, importantly, a eugenic element in her penultimate novel, Adnam’s Orchard (1912). However, she sees Grand as ultimately rejecting eugenics, and argues that the New Woman forced her readers “to question the biological essentialism at the heart of ideal womanhood” (Married 11, 2). I will argue, instead, that Grand’s enthusiasm for eugenics perpetuates biological essentialism in its most powerful form.

Biological determinism was central to the social and political agenda of a number of New Women writers as they situated themselves in the cross fire of the debates on national health and heredity.⁴ Positioned among social purists, Social Darwinists, and eugenists, these writers were concerned less with examining the unstable, socially constructed nature of selfhood and the body, than with grounding both the body and sex roles in the flesh and blood of evolutionary narrative. In fiction, the parts women could play in incubating a fit nation were popularized and diversified through plot and character. While novels such as Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) do explore the ways in which sexual difference is exaggerated by processes of culture, they ultimately represent sex as fixed, and character as largely determined by heredity. Grand’s perception of what the New Woman ought to be is, thus, at odds with the sexually indeterminate version favored by recent criticism.

In an interview in 1900, Grand expressed her regret at being associated with “the vulgar creature who now passes for the approved type of new woman” (Forbes 883). She emphasized that she had envisaged “a very different being...