It’s easy to forget just how far we’ve come. We have an awful long way to go in terms of equality, but we have at least got to the point where I can live with my boyfriend and no one except the staidest of elderly relatives will think anything of it. It wasn’t so in the 19th century, where a young lady seen in public with an unrelated male caused quite the scandal.

The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen is a short novel that charts the life of Herminia Barton, who decides early on in life that she is never going to marry for the simple reason that she sees marriage as a type of slavery, the ‘monopolisation of the heart’. Instead, when she meets and falls in love with Alan Merrick, she convinces him to stick to their shared abstract principles and risk social castigation by entering into a free union (as those radical unmarried relationships were then termed). Within six months she is pregnant, and in her brief capitulation to her partner’s instincts, agrees to go to Italy for the birth, though she still declines to marry him legally. Their child – who is repeatedly referred to as ‘half his and half hers’ in defiance of the general belief that children belonged to the man before the woman – will be brought up to share the couple’s advanced views, and, Herminia hopes, is ‘destined to regenerate humanity’. Both Herminia and Alan’s families have shunned them because of their refusal to marry, and especially because they will be bringing an illegitimate child into the world, so the couple are basically on their own.

While in Italy, though, tragedy strikes, and Alan dies of typhoid fever, leaving Herminia to be that most awful of social pariahs: the single mother of a child borne out of wedlock. The rest of the story traces her attempts to carve out a living back in London with new daughter Dolores (Dolores means ’sorrows’ in Latin) all the while trying to bring Dolly up to share her mother’s principles; to grow up to further the cause of women in society. But it doesn’t end up like that, and, without wanting to reveal anymore of the plot, prepare yourself not to find a happy ending.

The novel was a popular way to disseminate social and political ideas (and ideals) in the late nineteenth century – especially for women – hence the rash of ‘New Woman’ novels in the 1880s and 1890s, so it’s no surprise that this novel reads more like a polemic than a novel. What is surprising isn’t just that it was a man that wrote it, but that said man – Grant Allen – was in many ways not a friend to the feminist cause. In private he is known to have espoused views in opposition to the women’s movement, and in the novel itself makes it quite clear that, though advanced in thought, Herminia is still pure and innocent of intention. Her soul remains ’stainless’ to the very end. What’s more, she recoginizes that the best thing a woman can do is to become a mother – she just shouldn’t have to be married to do it. Motherhood, for Allen, makes the best use of woman’s innate gentleness of nature and pool of emotion. In many ways, were it not for Herminia’s resolution not to marry and her insistance on earning her own living even while Alan was alive, she would be a Victorian lady of the most ideal type. As third person narrator, Allen (for it can be no one but he) drums home that his character is

far removed indeed from that blatant and decadent sect of “advanced women” who talk as though motherhood were a disgrace and a burden, instead of being, as it is, the full realization of woman’s faculties, the natural outlet for woman’s wealth of emotion. She knew that to be a mother is the best privilege of her sex, a privilege of which unholy manmade institutions [marriage] conspire to deprive half the finest and noblest women in our civilised communities. Widowed as she was, she still pitied the unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life and dwarfed heart of the old maid; pitied them as sincerely as she despised those unhealthy souls who would make of celibacy, wedded or unwedded, a sort of anti-natural religion for women.

I could be here all day unpicking THAT particular minefield, and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the book was as controversial with contemporary feminists who were unhappy with the character of Herminia as it was with the most conservative readers who were disgusted at the idea of free unions.

If I’m quite honest, if I had been reading this novel at face value, I would have been disappointed. The writing isn’t brilliant, and the narrator spends much of the time quite beside himself about one thing or the other. The characters could do with greater texture; as it is some of them – Alan’s father, for instance, or Herminia’s father – run the risk of tipping over into cartoonishness. But, saying that, I read it for my dissertation, and there is certainly much to chew on when examining it within the context of the late Victorian New Woman novels. If you are interested in reading it, then allow me to recommend the excellent Broadview edition, with its invaluable (and numerous) notes, appendices, and scholarly introduction.