Alice mona caird biography

The early life of Mona Caird

Alice Mona Caird was born at 34 Pier Street, Ryde, and Isle of Wight in England on 24 May 1854. She was not only just a great novelist and essayist but a feminist. With her ideas and theories about ideal women and men lighted up controversies in the 19th-century.

She was born to John Alison, who claimed to be the inventor of the vertical boiler and Matilda Hector. Since her childhood, she used to write short stories and plays and explored the areas of writing and developed her to be proficient in French, English and German.

Marriage

On 19 December 1877, she got married to James Alexander Henryson-Caird JP, son of Sir James Caird and became Alice Mona Alison Caird. His husband was a farmer who used to farm his ancestral estate in Cassencary, Scotland.

They both got married at the Christ Church, Paddington, and London. Her husband supported her independence and respected her idea of equality in marriage.

Quite often she used to travel to different places to socialize with other literary people like Thomas hardy, who admired her work. With tr





That Mrs Caird sympathises with the Nihilists goes without saying; she is the priestess of revolt, and sympathises with revolters everywhere. — William Thomas Stead (519).

Mona Caird (née Alice Mona Alison), who was also known as Alice Mona Henryson Caird, 1854–1932, was an important New Woman essayist and novelist, social commentator, and campaigner against vivisection and eugenics. Her radical views on undesired marital sex, birth control, single motherhood, mother-daughter relationship, and free relationships after marital breakdown, expressed in her polemical essays and novels, prompted the emergence of the vivid marriage debate in the last decade of the Victorian era and in the early twentieth century.

Little is known about Mona Caird’s life because she left no autobiography or a journal, and biographical information is very sketchy and incomplete. She was born as Alice Mona Alison on 24 May 1854 in Ryde on the Isle of Wight as the only child of the 19-year-old Matilda Ann Jane Alison née Hector, from a well-to-do family in Schleswig-Holstein (then part of Denmark, now

Mona Caird became involved in various activities supporting women’s rights, and contributing articles to a number of influential magazines, including the radical quarterly Westminster Review and the Fortnightly Review. The 1888 article ‘Marriage’, criticising marriage for limiting and subordinating women, brought her widespread recognition and propelled the ‘New Woman’ into the public consciousness. The Daily Telegraph, which initiated an open correspondence, received 27000 letters in response. Caird’s article called for equality between partners, as well as identifying patriarchy as historically contingent rather than God-ordained. Like her contemporary, Zona Vallance, she saw patriarchal attitudes towards women and marriage as outdated remnants of an earlier time, ripe for reconsideration in the light of new understandings. Going further than many other women activists of the time, Caird also challenged the Victorian ideal of self-sacrificing motherhood, viewing this too as a tool of oppression.

Caird challenged contemporary eugenicists, defended women’s right

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