Mona Caird 1854 - 1932
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 19th century.
Mona Caird wrote for the wrote for the Westminster Review and was a friend of John Chapman.
In 1891, Mona Caird was a member of the first Council of the Women’s Emancipation Union alongside Agnes Pochin, Florence Dixie, *Harriet McIlquham and Agnes Sunley. Agnes’ daughter Laura Elizabeth Pochin McLaren was also a staunch feminist activist and she spoke alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1882.
Mona Caird was a friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Lady Jeune and Thomas Hardy:
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.
The Westminster Review was founded in 1823 by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as a quarterly journal for philosophical radicals, and was published from 1824 to 1914.
In 1851 the journal was acquired by John Chapman based at 142 the Strand, London, a publisher who originally had medical training.
The then unknown Mary Ann Evans, later better known by her pen name of George Eliot, had brought together his authors, including Francis William Newman, William Rathbone Greg, Harriet Martineau and the young journalist Herbert Spencer who had been working and living cheaply in the offices of The Economist opposite John Chapman’s house.
These authors met during that summer to give their support to this flagship of free thought and reform, joined by others including John Stuart Mill, William Benjamin Carpenter, Robert Chambers and George J. Holyoake. They were later joined by Thomas Henry Huxley, an ambitious young ship’s surgeon determined to become a naturalist.
Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the name George Eliot, became assistant editor and produced a four page prospectus setting out their common beliefs in progress, ameliorating ills and rewards for talent, setting out a loosely defined evolutionism as “the fundamental principle” of what she and John Chapman called the “Law of Progress”.
Mona Caird’s 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.
Mona Caird was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, daughter of John Alison, Midlothian inventor of the vertical boiler, and Matilda Hector.
She wrote stories and plays beginning in her early childhood, which reveal a proficiency in French and German as well as English.
In 1877, she married farmer James Alexander Henryson Caird, son of Sir James Caird (former MP for Sterling) on whose land in Cassencary he worked. Her husband was supportive of her independence, and although he resided primarily at Cassencary, she spent only a few weeks a year there, spending much of her time in London and traveling abroad.
She associated with literary people, including Thomas Hardy who was an admirer of her work, and educated herself in many areas of the humanities and science. The Cairds had one child, Alister James in 1884, and remained married until his death in 1921.
Caird published her first two novels, Whom Nature Leadeth (1883) and One That Wins (1887), under the pseudonym “G. Noel Hatton”, but these drew little attention.
Subsequent writings were published under her own name, which came to prominence in 1888 when the Westminster Review printed her long article Marriage. In it, she analyzed indignities historically suffered by women in marriage and called its present state a “vexatious failure”, advocating the equality and autonomy of marriage partners.
London’s widely circulated Daily Telegraph quickly responded with a series called “Is Marriage a Failure?”, which ran three months and drew a reported 27,000 letters from around the world. Feeling that her views had been misunderstood, she published another article called Ideal Marriage” later that year. Her numerous essays on marriage and women’s issues written from 1888 to 1894 were collected in a volume called The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women in 1897.
Continuing to write fiction, Caird published the novel The Wing of Azrael (1889), which deals with the subject of marital rape. In it, Viola Sedley murders her cruel husband in self defense.
Next was a short story collection, A Romance of the Moors (1891). In the title story, a widowed artist, Margaret Ellwood, stirs up the relationship of a young couple by counseling them to each become independent and self-sufficient persons.
Her most famous novel, Daughters of Danaus (1894), is the story of Hadria Fullerton, who has aspirations to become a composer, but finds that the demands on her time by family obligations, both to her parents and as a wife and mother, allow little time for this pursuit. The novel has since been regarded as a feminist classic.
Also well known is her short story The Yellow Drawing Room (1892), in which Vanora Haydon defies the conventional separation of “spheres” of men ans women. Such of her works have been referred to as “fiction of the New Woman“.
Active in the women’s suffrage movement from her early twenties, Caird joined the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1878, and later 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 the essay Militant Tactics and Woman’s Suffrage and participated in the second Hyde Park Demonstration for women’s suffrage.
She was also an active opponent of vivisection, writing extensively on the subject, including The Sanctuary Of Mercy (1895), Beyond the Pale (1896), and a play The Logicians: An episode in dialogue (1902), in which the characters argue opposing views on the issue.
Caird was a member of the Theosophical Society from 1904 to 1909. Among her later writings are a large illustrated volume of travel essays, Romantic Cities Of Provence (1906), and novels The Stones Of Sacrifice (1915), which depicts harmful effects of self sacrifice on women, and The Great Wave (1931), a social science fiction which attacks the racist policies of negative eugenics.
Mona Caird died February 4, 1932 at Hampstead.
Of interest:
Robert Henryson Caird 1850 - of Southbroom House, Devizes, and Millwall, Sandwich, Kent, J. P. Wilts, (Reform Club), Head of the London Homeopathic Hospital. Robert Henryson CAIRD, J.P.
The chairman of the House Committee of the London Homeopathic Hospital since 1908, and a Member of the Board of Management since 1904. Chairman of the Building Committee for the building of the Sir Henry Tyler Wing and the New Nurses Home, 1908-1911.
When the new London Homeopathic Hospital was designed and rebuilt in 1895 it was arranged that a further wing facing west to Queen Square could be added at any time when it might be required.
In 1908 it was found that the building was totally inadequate to the demands made upon it, and, indeed, for two or tree years the usefulness of its work had been greatly hampered by the lack of space.
The extension of the London Homeopathic Hospital building on the adjoining freehold ground, including the Queen’s Head public house, which by this date had been purchased for the purpose, was now very forcibly impressed upon the Board of Management. That there was now very forcibly impressed upon the Board of Management.
That there was an urgent need for enlargement was only too apparent when serious cases frequently had to be refused admission because there was no room to receive them. In one small section only of the In patients, nine women each waited over three months, and eight others waited over six months for admission.
The present London Homeopathic Hospital Building has now been in use for sixteen years, 1895 - 1911, and during the last eight years in the old building in Great Ormond Street the In-patients totaled:
1887 to 1895 ….. 5,680
In the next two periods of eight years in the present building the In patient had increased to:
1895 to 1902 ….. 8,150 In patients
1903 to 1911 ….. 8,699 do.After much consideration the Board decided to enlarge the London Homeopathic Hospital, and with a view to starting an extension fund to build a new West Wing to the existing London Homeopathic Hospital, Sir Henry Tyler, as already mentioned, contributed £10,000, the late Mrs. Rylands £5,000, Lord Dysart £2,000, the late Captain Cundy, Vice Chairman of the board, £1,000, C.M. £1,000, and with the assistance of many other warm friends and supporters of the London Homeopathic Hospital, the sum of £47,000 was soon raised for the purpose.
The President of the British Homeopathic Society Wynne Thomas, the President of the previous British Homeopathic Congress James Johnstone, together with the Vice President of the International Homeopathic Council George Henry Burford, met by arrangement the Chairman of the London Homeopathic Hospital, Robert Henryson Caird to consider the necessary preliminaries.
Their consultation issued in the nomination of a Provisional Committee constituted by representatives of the principal homeopathic activities in Great Britain, and the publication of a statement of the case, with an appeal for funds to those favourably inclined to the work.
Thus did the leaders of British Homeopathy lead, and the response of the English speaking homeopaths the world over was immediate and maintained. Fortified by this support, the Provisional Committee nominated two Commissioners Dr. Hoyle and David MacNish to proceed to France to confer with the military authorities there, as well as with the principal homeopathic physicians in Paris.
As the issue of this investigation, the Committee decided to work under the auspices of the French Red Cross Society, and to internationalism as far as possible, the interest it was desirable to arouse of homeopathic supporters in this special procedure.
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