The Woman Who Did (1895) is a novel by Grant Allen about a young, self-assured middle-class woman who defies convention as a matter of principle and who is fully prepared to suffer the consequences of her actions. It was first published in London by John Lane in a series intended to promote the ideal of the "New Woman". It was adapted into a British silent film in 1915, The Woman Who Did , which was directed by Walter West, and later into a 1925 German film, Die Frau mit dem schlechten Ruf .
Herminia Barton, the Cambridge-educated daughter of a clergyman, frees herself from her parents' influence, moves to London and starts living alone. As she is not a woman of independent means, she starts working as a teacher. When she meets and falls in love with Alan Merrick, a lawyer, she suggests they live together without getting married. Reluctantly, he agrees, and the couple move to Italy. There, in Florence, Merrick dies of typhoid before their daughter Dolores is born. Legal technicalities and the fact that the couple were not married prevent Herminia from inheriting any of Merrick's money.
Dreaming of being a role model for Dolores and her friends, Herminia returns to England and raises her daughter as a single mother. She wants to show the younger generation that even as a woman there is something one can do about the unfair position of women in society—a small step maybe, but with more and larger steps to follow soon. However, Dolores turns out to be ashamed of her mother's unmarried state and gradually turns against her. Eventually, Herminia chooses to make a huge sacrifice for her daughter's benefit and commits suicide.
Allen was sympathetic to the feminist cause and saw his novel as a way to promote women's rights. It certainly created an immediate popular sensation - Flora Thompson for instance describing how, in small-town Hampshire, "copies were bought and handed round until practically everyone of mature age in the village had read and passed judgement on it". [1] However, the novel was also controversial right from the start, with conservative readers as well as feminists criticizing Allen for the heroine he had invented. For example, Victoria Crosse wrote her novel The Woman Who Didn't (1895) as a response to Allen's book and Mrs. Lovett Cameron wrote The Man Who Didn't. [2]
Whereas Herminia Barton questions the institution of marriage by refusing to get married herself, Victoria Crosse's heroine Eurydice Williamson—"the woman who didn't"—remains faithful to her impossible husband although, during a passage from India, she meets a man who falls in love with her. Similarly, Lovett Cameron's hero is a married man who resists the temptation to stray.
Another novel written in reply to Allen's work, Lucas Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't, (1895) sold well and received hostile reviews. The author said of this:
"If one young girl is kept from a loveless, mistaken marriage, if one frivolous nature is checked in her career of flirtation by remembrance of Lady Morris, I shall perhaps be forgiven by the public for raising my feeble voice in answer to The Woman Who Did". [3]
The campaigner Emma Brooke saw this novel and her own novel "The Superfluous Woman" as important in trying to resolve the "Sex Question" which she thought dominated intellectual debate in the 1880s. She was annoyed when H. G. Wells reinvented the question when he spoke to the Fabian Society in 1906. [4]
Sarah Grand, the feminist writer who coined the term "New Woman," considered the novel to have and important social purity moral:
Mr. Grant Allen is a large-minded, liberal man, and he argues that if men are permitted to practice polygamy then women should be equally free to indulge in polyandry. I do not know that he approves of polygamy, only he is liberal enough to say that if men are to claim sexual freedom then it should be accorded to women also. The story answers the question when followed to its logical conclusions, and shows very clearly that women have nothing to gain and everything to lose by renouncing the protection which legal marriage gives. [5]
Thomas Hardy approved more of Allen's progressive aims in the novel, than of their artistic realisation. [6]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her works were primarily focused on gender, specifically gendered labor division in society, and the problem of male domination. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, feminist and social reformer. She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society. Additionally, she authored several popular books, with her most notable being The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain and Industrial Democracy, co-authored by her husband Sidney Webb, where she coined the term "collective bargaining" as a way to discuss the negotiation process between an employer and a labor union. As a feminist and social reformer, she criticised the exclusion of women from various occupations as well as campaigning for the unionisation of female workers, pushing for legislation that allowed for better hours and conditions.
Jacobine Camilla Collett was a Norwegian writer, often referred to as the first Norwegian feminist. She was also the younger sister of Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland, and is recognized as being one of the first contributors to realism in Norwegian literature. Her younger brother was Major General Joseph Frantz Oscar Wergeland. She became an honorary member of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights when the association was founded in 1884.
Lily Braun, born Amalie von Kretschmann, was a German feminist writer and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). She developed the idea of the single-kitchen home.
So Long a Letter is a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel originally written in French by the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ. It was her first novel. Its theme is the condition of women in Western African society.
Annie Sophie Cory (1 October 1868 – 2 August 1952) was a British author of popular, racy, exotic New Woman novels under the pseudonyms Victoria Cross(e), Vivian Cory and V.C. Griffin.
Alice Mona Alison Caird was an English novelist and essayist known for feminist writings, which were controversial when they were published. She also advocated for animal rights and civil liberties, and contributed to advancing the interests of the New Woman in the public sphere.
Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a woman's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Composed while Wollstonecraft was a governess in Ireland, the novel was published in 1788 shortly after her summary dismissal and her decision to embark on a writing career, a precarious and disreputable profession for women in 18th-century Britain.
Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.
Fatma Aliye Topuz, often known simply as Fatma Aliye or Fatma Aliye Hanım, was a Turkish novelist, columnist, essayist, women's rights activist and humanitarian. Although there was an earlier published novel by the Turkish female author Zafer Hanım in 1877, since that one remained her only novel, Fatma Aliye Hanım with her five novels is credited by literary circles as the first female novelist in Turkish literature and the Islamic world.
Adeline Georgiana Isabel Kingscote was an English novelist, the author of over sixty works including The Woman Who Wouldn't in 1895. After her marriage to Colonel Howard Kingscote, most of her novels were published under the name Mrs Howard Kingscote.
Changes: a Love Story is a 1991 novel by Ama Ata Aidoo, chronicling a period of the life of a career-centred Ghanaian woman as she divorces her first husband and marries into a polygamist union. It was published by the Feminist Press.
The Woman Who Did is a 1925 German silent drama film directed by Benjamin Christensen and starring Lionel Barrymore, Gustav Fröhlich and Alexandra Sorina. It was an adaptation of the 1895 British novel The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen. The film's art direction was by Hans Jacoby.
Raven Black is a 2006 novel by Ann Cleeves that won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for the best crime novel of the year. Raven Black is the first in the "Shetland" mysteries, a series of eight novels by Cleeves, composed of two quartets, all set in Shetland.
Mrs. Lovett Cameron or Caroline "Emily" Sharp was a British romantic fiction author. She wrote more than fourteen three-volume novels.
Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann was a Brazilian writer who published feminist novels and other works under the pseudonym Délia.
Emma Brooke or Emma Frances Brooke was a British novelist and a campaigner for the rights of women and workers.
Charlotte Ives Cobb Kirby was an influential and radical women's rights activist and temperance advocate in the state of Utah as well as a well-known national figure. Charlotte was born in Massachusetts and at seven years of age moved to Nauvoo, Illinois with her mother, an early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There, without divorcing father Henry Cobb, her mother became Brigham Young's second plural wife. They then moved to Utah in 1848. Charlotte, previously a plural wife herself, spoke out against polygamy and gained much opposition from polygamous women suffragists because of it. Her first marriage was to William S. Godbe, the leader of the Godbeite offshoot from the LDS Church. After divorcing Godbe, Kirby married John Kirby, a non-LDS man, and they were together until Charlotte's death in 1908. Charlotte was a leading figure of the Utah Territory Woman Suffrage Association, and served as a correspondent to the government and other suffragist organizations, including the National Women's Suffrage Association. Charlotte often traveled to the East Coast to deliver lectures regarding women's rights and temperance, the first Utah woman and the first woman with voting rights to speak to national suffragist audiences. Charlotte Ives Cobb Kirby died on January 24, 1908, at age 71 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Prothom Protishruti, also spelled Pratham Pratishruti, is a 1964 Bengali novel by Ashapurna Devi. Considered to be Devi's magnum opus, it tells a story of Satyabati who was given away in marriage at the age of eight to maintain the social norms, and was kept under strict surveillance of brahmanical regulations. The novel narrates Satyabati's struggle to fight against family control, mental violence of the polygamy system, and social prejudices in patriarchal society. It won Rabindra Puraskar in 1965 and Jnanpith Award in 1976.
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