The Legacy of Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins: A Review Essay

The Legacy of Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins: A Review Essay Marilyn Bonnell Pennsylvania State University Sarah Grand. The Heavenly Twins Introduction, Carol A. Senf 1893. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992 xxxvii + 679 pp. Cloth $37.50 Paper $15.95 "ADEAR OLD GENTLEMAN wrote to me the other day to implore me not to read The Heavenly Twins. He said a knowledge of such books would entirely spoil the charm of women like myself."1 The gentleman's admonition was too late. His utterly charming correspondent, Frances McFaIl, had not only read the season's best-seller: she had written it. Although the opening salvo of the New Woman revolution had been fired by Olive Schreiner in The Story of an African Farm (1883), it remained for Sarah Grand (Frances McFaIl) to establish the popularity of the novel of, to quote Carol Senfs introduction to this reprint, the "well-educated , middle-class woman who was openly critical of the traditional roles established for women, especially marriage and motherhood, and who was influenced by the feminist movement to speak out in favor of equal education for women and equal purity for men and women."2 If Grand did not actually open the floodgates of what some called the "Modern Woman Novel" or the "Fiction of the Revolt," she was one of the first women pioneers of the genre, followed by such authors as Mona Caird, George Egerton, Iota (Kathleen Mannington Caffyn), Emma Frances Brooke, Ménie Muriel Dowie, Arabella Kenealy, Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Edith Johnstone, all who constructed their own vision of the nineteenth-century liberated woman. But for many, Frances McFaIl, 467 ELT 36:4 1993 forever more to be known as Sarah Grand, was the genre's premier novelist and The Heavenly Twins the most representative New Woman novel. One of the last of the three-volume or "triple-decker" novels, The Heavenly Twins uses a traditional form to introduce a revolutionary content. Although at the time some critics felt that the novel lacked coherence, it is clear that Grand constructed the tales of Edith, Angelica, and Evadne to indict society for the deleterious effects of socialization on women. Their stories reflect and complement each other. Edith Beale is the quintessential Victorian innocent, unprepared by her upbringing to do the essential: look life in the face. The daughter of a bishop, Edith is prepared only to consort with the angels and gets to do so in short order after her equally ingenuous parents see her joined in short-lived hymeneal bliss to Sir Mosley Menteith, a womanizer afflicted with venereal disease. After the birth of her son, born with secondary syphilis, Edith progresses from insanity to death. In Grand's novel, innocence never brings happiness—but neither does knowledge. If it did, Evadne Frayling would have been spared the misery of a similar marital conflict. Evadne has educated herself by reading John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women and various others texts on mathematics, history, philosophy, and medicine. But knowledge is futile if it is not accompanied by freedom of choice. Despite her inquiring mind and academic armament, Evadne too marries a profligate, Major George Colquhoun, at the urging of her parents. Her readings in anatomy, pathology, and physiology prove to be of no use to her since the truth about her fiance's past remains a secret until after the wedding. Unlike her friend Edith, Evadne preserves her own health by sacrificing her husband's sexual satisfaction. But her dilemma is not resolved. At the heart of the novel lies Evadne's lamentation: "You have never thought about what a woman ought to do who has married a bad [man]."3 It is clear that Sarah Grand, who left her husband after two decades of marriage and one son, spent much time carefully considering the dilemma. If Edith's sexual compliance seals her own death warrant while Evadne's sexual non-compliance leads to a repression of spirit that leaves her suicidal, what then is Grand's solution? As Carol Senf points out in the introduction, the three interwoven stories in The Heavenly Twins "resemble real life more than they resemble earlier fiction."4...