Ideala: A Study from Life [Annotated]

by Sarah Grand, Molly Youngkin (Editor)

One of the earliest "New Woman" novels, Ideala (1888) tells the story of a woman who, after making a bad marriage, must decide whether to leave her husband for another man or embrace a feminist philosophy that requires her to sacrifice personal relationships for the good of other women. Told in first-person, by Ideala's friend Lord Dawne, the novel details Ideala's journey to understanding herself and her place in nineteenth-century society. Along the way, we see her writing poetry, providing charity to the poor, falling in love, and travelling to China, all as means to figure out how to live her life in a meaningful way.

Author Sarah Grand, best known for The Heavenly Twins (1893), published Ideala with her own money after leaving her unhappy marriage and coming to London to establish herself as a professional writer in the early 1880s. In Ideala, Grand lays out the foundations for the New Woman of the 1890s by showing how one woman processes the legal and economic restrictions women in unhappy marriages faced in the nineteenth century and thinks through how to remedy her own situation.

This edition includes an introduction that examines the biographical and historical contexts that influenced Grand's writing, explanatory notes, and an appendix of contemporary reviews of the novel.

"For those who have been reading Ideala on microfiche or in crumbling antique editions, Molly Youngkin's new scholarly edition will be a tremendous boon. Given the dearth of in-print editions of New Woman novels by women, Valancourt's Ideala will offer a welcome alternative to those old stand-bys, Gissing's The Odd Women and Hardy's Jude the Obscure." - Anna Jones, University of Central Florida

Genres: Classics, 19th Century

328 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1888

About the author

Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke, Irish-English writer.

Reviews

[Dushan Milinovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I wore a skirt in the nineteenth century, she would be me.

[alexmarsilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can’t sweep a room that requires it without raising a dust; the thing is to let the dust settle again, and then remove it.

[Jacob Longini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely more of an educational read than it is an entertaining one, Grand's work communicates the many Women's Rights ideas that were circulating in the late 19th Century. Ideala represents a shift from liberal feminism to social purity feminism, something modern audiences will not find very satisfactory in the plot of the novel, but a very interesting case for scholars of women writers in the long 19th Century. The work is also interesting in its transition between the 19th Century conventions of literary realism to proto-modernist techniques that would rise in the 20th century. The introduction by Molly Youngkin (my professor of 19th Century Women's Literature) is very insightful, and her work in editing the edition as a whole is fantastic. The whole novel is filled with helpful footnotes in which Youngkin adds rich detail regarding the cultural context behind the story. Again, not a book for those looking to be entertained, but an essential read for scholars interested in related content.

[darcy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Opening Line: She came among us without flourish of trumpets.

Rating: 2.5/5 Stars