SARAH GRAND

                       SARAH GRAND

Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House,Donagadee County Down, Ireland of English parents. Her father was Edward John Bellenden Clarke (1813–1862) and her mother was Margaret Bell Sherwood (1813–1874). When her father died, her mother took her and her siblings back to Brindlington, England to be near her family who lived at Rysome Garth near Hoipmton in East Yorkshire.
Grand's education was very sporadic, yet she managed with perseverance to make a career for herself as an activist and writer, drawing on her travels and life experiences.
In 1868 Grand was sent to the Royal Naval School, Twickenham, but was soon expelled for organizing groups that supported Josephine Butler's protests against the Contagous Deseases Act which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the sole cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, subjecting them to indignities such as inspection of their genitals and enclosure in locked hospital wards.
Grand was then sent to a finishing school in Kensington, London. In August 1870, at the age of sixteen, she married widowed Army surgeon David Chambers McFall, who was 21 years her senior and had two sons from his previous marriage: Chambers Haldane Cooke McFall and Albert William Crawford McFall. Grand and McFall's ly child, David Archibald EdvardMcFall, was born in Sandgate,kent, on 7 October 1871. He became an actor and took the name Archie Carlaw Grand
Through her relationship to an army surgeon, Grand learned of the anatomical physiology of the nature of Sexually transmitted diseases. She used this knowledge in her later novel The Heavenly Twins, warning of the dangers of Syphilis, advocating sensitivity rather than condemnation for the young women infected with this disease.
From 1873 to 1878 the family travelled in the Far East, providing Grand with more material for her fiction. In 1879 they moved to Norwich, and in 1881 to Warrington, Lancashire where her husband retired.
Upon returning to England, she and her husband became sexually estranged by her husband's bizarre sexual appetites. Grand felt constrained by her marriage. She turned to writing, but her first novel, Ideala, self-published in 1888, enjoyed limited success and some negative reviews. Nevertheless, she trusted in her new career to support her in her decision to leave her husband in 1890 and move to London. Recently enacted laws that allowed women to retain their personal property after marriage were an encouraging factor in her decision.
She used her experience of suffocation in marriage and the joy of consequent liberation in her fictional depictions of pre-suffrage women with few political rights and options, trapped in oppressive marriages. Later works would have a more sympathetic stance to males, such as Babs the Impossible in which the single noble women would feel resurgence in their worth encouraged by an idealistic self made man.