The Heavenly Twins

by Sarah Grand

The Heavenly Twins (1893) is a novel by Sarah Grand. Written the same year Grand moved to London, divorced her husband, and created a new identity for herself, The Heavenly Twins explores the feminist ideal of the New Woman. As a pioneering feminist whose marriage ended in bitter disappointment, Grand sought to address the frustrations of women whose every move in life was measured against the expectations of a patriarchal society. In her novel, she explores gender dysphoria, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception as aspects of a wider feminine experience largely ignored in much of English literature. To be a young woman in Victorian England, one grows accustomed to the indignities of daily life. Despite this, Evadne, Angelica, and Edith do their best to live happily while keeping their families satisfied. Evadne struggles to match the realities of married life with the expectations of traditional society. Meanwhile, Edith enters a relationship with a man who seems well-intentioned but harbors a dangerous secret. Angelica, their friend, bristles against the strictures of womanhood. With the help of her twin brother Diavolo, she explores the freedoms afforded young men for nothing more than the gender they were assigned at birth. Dissatisfied with her life, she begins dressing as a man and uses her new identity to expand her social and romantic opportunities. As their lives take tragic and disappointing turns, they begin to understand how so many women end up trapped by marriage and motherhood, unable to pursue their dreams. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins is a classic work of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Victorian, 19th Century, Feminism, Novels, Historical

704 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1893

About the author

Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke, Irish-English writer.

Reviews

[Leonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting mess with syphilis and cross-dressing. Grand uses three heroines to explore issues like marriage, outlets for women's abilities and sexual morality. Part of the messiness is because the novel ends up like a jigsaw puzzle with Grand juggling the different strands and partly it's because Grand does that thing proto-feminist Victorian novels do where the established workings of the novel universe suddenly change to accommodate a less feminist ending.

Evadne is something of a Dorothea Brooke character. A very serious, calm, clever, dangerously naïve girl who has spent her girlhood reading and thinking about gender relations without quite realising her conclusions run very much counter to those of her idolised father. She marries young, giving the matter little consideration, and discovers just in time to avoid consummating the marriage that her husband led a dissolute life and that she doesn't consider him good enough for her. This is something Grand has a real bee in her bonnet about. Women ought to make men behave by refusing to put up with them and should give up on the idea of reforming them or nobly suffering them. It's the usual idea really that women are the purer, less sexual sex, Grand just thinks women should take a more militant approach to the task of making men better. Evadne and her husband live together to keep up appearances and are kind of friends, though he really is of a lower moral order.

Edith is a friend of Evadne's. She marries a dissolute man with syphilis. She doesn't know about the syphilis but she thinks he's ready for marriage now and everything will be lovely. It ends badly. Edith is the least substantial of the three main characters. She's basically just there to be the sacrificial lamb.

Angelica, another family friend of Evadne's, is one of the heavenly twins of the title. She and her brother are children for part of the book, being adorable, astonishingly intelligent delinquents. You know the drill. Angelica is the most intelligent and delinquent of the two and her brother conspires with her to allow her access to some of the experiences that would normally be reserved for her brother. This can't last forever. Frustrated and troubled by adult femininity she abruptly marries an indulgent older man, thinking it her best way to escape from her family's expectations of proper young ladies. Bored and unfulfilled, she takes to going out at night dressed as a boy, and strikes up an odd friendship with a mysterious tenor from the cathedral choir. The Tenor is "in love" with the real Angelica who he idealises from afar at cathedral services, while his real intimacy is with the Boy. When he finds out they are one, everything is ruined. He's lost his ideal, because the real Angelica is a hoodlum, and now that the Boy is a Girl the friendship is dead. The tragedy is that gender conventions prevent him from properly liking someone he does actually like, and that Angelica can't fully express herself any other way. This tragic stuff is partly Grand's point, but there's a lot of other stuff mixed up with it too and it all gets very melodramatic. On the one hand, Angelica kind of needs reforming and on the other I don't like the huge emphasis on her learning to be good from the Tenor who she has wronged.

Both Angelica and Evadne end up being cared for by kind, indulgent husbands. The earlier emphasis on women's superior goodness changes into men helping frail women to be good. That was frustrating. This is a self-indulgent book, messy, as I said, but I found it very entertaining. You could certainly find a lot to say about the gender stuff in it, so it's a shame it's fallen out of the picture so much. It's an interesting picture of the convoluted connections produced by Victorian feminism.

[Wealhtheow]

recommended to me as: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8676 The Heavenly Twins, by Sarah Grand. A "New Woman" novel, which demands that men be held accountable for things like faithlessness before marriage, too. Screamingly funny in parts, very not-so in others. Has twins, crossdressing, tomboys, and (possible trigger warning) attempted suicide.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book to be reading at the same time as Rachilde's Monsieur Venus, as both are written by women and deal with restrictions on gender roles, transvestism and women reaching beyond the boundaries of their late-19th century society. But while Rachilde's book is brief and decadent, Sarah Grand's New Woman novel is thoroughly Victorian in its sensibility. Grand's women are painted most often as victims, though two of her three heroines have happy (if compromise) endings; her men are either villainous or rational and sympathetic to the point of saintliness. I began it shortly after teaching excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and found that, despite the hundred years that had passed, the issues of women's education and independence Wollstonecraft had raised were still very much in play. The book is a bit ponderous, but it's well worth reading for anyone interested in women's issues and gender roles in the late Victorian era.

[Jeanine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would actually rate this book as 3.5. I gave it a lot of thought, I first was going to only give it a 3.0 because there were parts of the book I did not like. However, thinking about what the author was trying to say, how she was really trying to help the women & men of her day, I came to understand it more. I realize she was trying to do more than simply write a novel, that she had a strong message. So, I decided to give a rating of 3.5.

I first read Ms. Grant's other book, "The Beth Book," and I loved that book & gave it a 5-star rating. This book, however, was a bit different. There were quite a few sections that were very dry & a bit difficult to read. The story itself was good, certainly not happy, but intense. She was trying to wake people up, to the horrors of turning a blind eye to the bad behavior of men, while expecting women to be totally pure & moral. The promiscuity of men too often resulted in young women contracting syphilis & also giving birth to babies who had the disease. They were often literally sacrificed, to uphold society's standards of the day. Ms. Grant railed against this horror in the book. She also seemed furious at the double standards that existed when it came to the education, or lack of it, for girls & women. Also, women were expected to not even have opinions or ideas, as this was considered to be unfeminine.

Reading a bit about the author, I realized she was a pioneer in the fight for women's rights. It's not surprising that this book was controversial & that she had trouble getting it published. I can imagine that many people would not want her views to catch on, lest other women want to change, too. She was part of what was called the "New Women," & she definitely wanted to make a difference.

This book took me quite some time to read, but I'm glad I did read it. It was an eye-opener, too. I realize that in the 1970s, women were still fighting for equal rights in education and in the work force. It is a never-ending struggle, & the world always needs women like Sarah Grant, who can speak out & write well, in an attempt to help others. I look forward to reading more by Ms. Grant.

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Heavenly Twins is the kind of triple-decker Victorian novel that is easy to make fun of, quite aside from its individual characteristics which are also . . . easy to make fun of. This is a strange book, but an interesting one. Grand's challenge to Victorian morality ends up just as moralizing as her opponents, and what was controversial then reads more than a little dated today. (And, frankly, even by the standards some of her contemporaries, Grand is kind of bourgeois and banal as far as morality and gender analysis is concerned.)

I read this book for a class, and wrote a paper on it, so as you can imagine there is some PTSD. I don't think Grand is a great stylist, but I think her political statement is interesting and more complicated than people tend to give her credit for.

There are two other books connected to this one. They are Ideala, which is set before THT, and The Beth Book, which follows it.

[PJ's Services, LLC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much beating around the bush to get to a point!

The story itself was an excellent story, but it took forever to get to the meat of the story! It was many French words and expressions used in between that wasn't explained so you didn't really know or understand what they were saying. Then there were times when so much was said that wasn't necessary to be fed so much description of things that was not necessary that it got it way off point and then finally brought you back to the point you were waiting for. It was too much humdrum talk in it that it made you lose interest in the story itself if you were not already stuck in the story. It was so much talk when so little was needing to be said. It made the book so much longer than it had to be and took forever to get through it when it could have gotten through it a bit quicker and a lot more enjoyable. That made it very frustrating. But I didn't want to stop the book because the story itself was good.

[Ozlem Demirel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book in which Grand explicitly attacks the constraints of sexual double standards and Victorian matrimony. Though the novel is a ground-breaking example of the New Woman fiction, it indeed employs sensational tropes, which makes the book very interesting in terms of the relationship between the two genres.
I remember when this book was published for the first time, the whole topic was regarded as taboo because Grand draws attention to the sexual and venereal dichotomy related to social, psychological and cultural repression in the centre of women's world.
Although the book is kind of a long one, it is definitely worth reading. Especially if you are very into gender studies or the New Woman genre and Victorian studies, or even interested in gender-related topics.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 4.5! Truly, I think this is the most underrated, and generally under-the-radar book, I have ever encountered. I'm shocked to see how little reviews are here for such a groundbreaking Victorian text. Grand's depiction of women characters, especially during this time, is something to cherish. My only critique is that it could have cut out many characters - especially during that 160-300ish page section.

[knell ✿]

Read only three portions (Proem, The Tenor and the Boy, Mrs. Kilroy of Ilverthorpe) within this sprawling tome, so I won't be rating this one. But whilst some passages were grating, especially Angelica's back-and-forth soliloquizing, I enjoyed most of what the book was trying to say, and found it surprisingly quotable.

[Stelren · Rating 3 out of 5]

*ma stat la plus satisfaisante! Jamais mis autant de temps à lire un livre god

« Is that how you interpret her?" he said. "One who holds herself well in hand, bent upon enjoying every moment of her life and all the variety of it, perceiving that it is stupid to narrow it down to the indulgence of one particular set of emotions, and determined not to swamp every faculty by constant cultivation of the animal instincts to which all ages have created altars! Best for herself, I suppose, but hardly possible at present. The capacity, you know, is only coming. Women have been cramped into a small space so long that they cannot expand all at once when they are let out; there must be a great deal of stretching and growing, and when they are not on their guard, they will often find themselves falling into the old attitude, as newborn babes are apt to resume the ante-natal position. She will have the perception, the inclination; but the power—unless she is exceptional, the power will only be for her daughter's daughter."
"Then she must suffer and do no good?"
"She must suffer, yes; but I don't know about the rest. She may be a seventh wave, you know!"

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. I read this book three years ago and thought I liked it at the time, but the more I think about it, the more I hate it. Grand says some very good things in THT that needed to be said at the time, and she knows how to spin a yarn, but I simply cannot countenance this novel any longer. Why, you ask? Because a middle-aged man (whom we're expected to view as sympathetic and a "good guy") marries a 16-year-old girl, and after their marriage SHE CALLS HIM “DADDY,” and this is seen as perfectly acceptable. And I won’t be entertaining the “you’re just indulging in presentism, 16-year-olds were considered adults at the time” argument because

SHE

CALLS

HER HUSBAND

“DADDY.”

I’ve never seen this in all the Victorian literature I’ve read in which adult men marry teenage girls half their age (and that phenomenon is bad enough on its own), and I just can’t get past it.

Not only that, but in one scene, the dude gets his shorts in a twist over her acting like a child - i.e. her age - and then in another nauseating scene he’s figuratively biting his knuckle and lamenting having to raise a child when he wanted a wife:

Had he not himself seen fifty households wrecked because the husband, when he took a girl, little more than a child in years, and quite a child in mind and experience, from her own family, and the wholesome influences and companionship of father, mother, brothers, sisters, probably left her to go unguided, to form her character as best she could, putting that grave responsibility in her own weak hands as if the mere making a wife of her must make her a mature and sensible woman also?

“Quite a child in mind” = CHILD, you sick sack of pus. You had the choice to marry someone who was already a mature and sensible woman, so cry me a river.

There are certain things I know to expect from literature of yesteryear and can more or less take in stride because “it was a different time,” but Grand crosses a line. What’s puzzling is that elsewhere in the book she rightly decries the needless self-sacrifice of women, while here she’s brazenly oblivious to her complacency towards girls’ sacrificing the remainder of their childhood - to say nothing of most or all of their adult life, since they “consented” to a marriage that they might not have agreed to if they’d been presented with the choice when they were sufficiently psychologically mature - to creeps who won’t pick on someone their own size (so to speak).

Characters who we can safely assume reflect the writer's own views talk a big game about supporting the idea that marriage should be a partnership between equals, but Grand declines to consider that a "partnership" between a 16-year-old girl and a middle-aged man cannot be equal.

Anyway, further to anyone protesting to this review with “whah whah presentism,” God bless Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Helen H. Gardener, who were also writing in the second half of the 19th century and rightly portrayed predation on girls about Angelica’s age as just that - predation.

By the way, yes, I do remember that the girl in question actually proposed (more or less) to Sick Sack of Pus instead of the other way around, but he, as the adult in the situation, should have proposed waiting a few years before marrying her. But of course he was never going to do that. He was practically licking his chops over her.

[darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opening Line: At nineteen Evadne looked out of narrow eyes at an untried world inquiringly.

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

the heavenly twins is one of those novels where, upon its close, you feel like you have lived many lifetimes. if you read it carefully, you mourn exiting that world, knowing that you will walk with those characters in those places no longer (i cried during the ending). this novel is an extremely important piece of new woman fiction, especially considering its crossdressing subplot which incorporates transgender discourses that were actually happening at the fin de siècle. but the novel’s historical significance—and it’s relevance to our own discourses about sex/gender, which were shaped by victorian writers like grand—is only enhanced by the sheer beauty of the novel. the heavenly twins is structured as an opera; grand’s use of music, and sound more broadly, deserves greater attention. the chime throughout the novel….haunting. the contemporary reader needs to pay close attention to this book; sometimes it takes time and patience. and, of course, we cannot forget that this is a victorian text: yes, despite its popularity and influence in the 1890s, it does contain what we would now deem as problematic representations of gender. again, it was the 1890s: we learn from history to improve our present, since everything we are now has been built upon victorian foundations. cannot recommend this read highly enough

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an astonishingly compelling read this was. I thought I knew my Victorian literature fairly well, but had never heard of this author. It's very very long, three-volume Trollope or Thackeray type long, and the interludes with the Tenor make it difficult to follow on an e-reader where you can't easily look back (and where you don't always trust PG not to have put 2 different books in the same download), but it really is a page-turner. Although it's spoken of now as an early feminist text, it reminded me very much of Charlotte Yonge. Be warned, it is not in any way a happy book: I hated to see Angelina grow up and lose her sparkle, and I was completely misled by Evadne - I thought I saw a happy ending coming up but the novel is too honest for that. Other reviewers have said that Grand sells out the New Woman at the end: I think she is merely realistic. I'm torn whether or not to recommend this because it was just so sad....

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re-read "The Tenor and the Boy: An Interlude," which was published independently as a short story before The Heavenly Twins was a novel. In situ it serves as a wonderful interlude in an uneven work (Grand sells out womankind in the extremely disturbing conclusion, which is why I so rarely recommend this forgotten treasure).

The Heavenly Twins is misleadingly about more than just those characters, Angelica and Diavolo; but the Tenor and the Boy is about those twins, and the difference their sex makes in their ability to experience the world. I love it, warts and all, and it's one of the most influential pieces I've ever read when it comes to my own writing.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not every 1890s novel features cross-dressing, syphilis, and meditations on the position of woman in society, but many do - and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins is an intriguing example of this "New Woman" (a word coined by Grand) genre. The heroine's father should read as an exemplar for unbearable chauvinists everywhere, as he insists that "A woman closely resembles a parrot in her mental processes" (12). Grand's very long novel is an argument against such refusals to think of women as equal human beings.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting stuff in this novel about gender, society, marriage and mental health. Grand was a pioneer in the New Woman movement of the late nineteenth century, and this novel takes up the physical, social and mental damage done to women by the compromises they were expected to make in marriage.

[Rachael Mariboho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably my favorite book from my Victorian Comps. reading list. Grand provides an intense understanding of the condition for women during the Victorian era. The Heavenly twins of the title are so fun and endearing, and there are great moments of humor in the book.

[John T]

Finally, FINALLY finished this book. it took me awhile, because there was a great deal of stop and start on my part, but I did enjoy it, even though she shopped her sex out in the end ;-)

[LOL_BOOKS]

WHAT LESS-POPULAR CLASSIC NOVELS DO YOU THINK ARE ACTUALFAX GRATE?

THE HEAVENLY TWINS BY SARAH GRAND IS QUITE FANDOMY IN SOME WAYS.