Grant Allen’s Notorious Bestseller The Woman Who Did (1895): What Did She Do? Why Did She Do It? and What Were the Consequences?

Nicholas Ruddick
Department of English

7 November 2002

Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did was first published in 1895 and became one of the best-sellers of the late nineteenth century. It’s about Herminia Barton, a “New Woman”―highly-educated, free-thinking, idealistic―who is determined to find a way to remake patriarchal late-Victorian English society in a way that is more favourable to women. She decides that, as matrimony oppresses women, she will refuse her lover’s proposal of marriage, but instead join him in a “free union” unsanctified by any vow. She soon becomes pregnant, but just before their child is born, her lover dies of a fever, leaving her as an unmarried mother―in Victorian parlance, as a fallen woman with her bastard.

The second half of the novel details Herminia’s struggle to support herself and her daughter Dolores, and culminates in Herminia’s suicide when the 17-year-old Dolores announces that her illegitimacy is standing in the way of her desire to become engaged to an eligible young man. The novel produced extraordinary debate on its publication, and interestingly, its harshest critics were traditionalists on the one hand, and women in the first-wave feminist movement on the other. Both groups were appalled, but for slightly different reasons, that the novel promoted free love. Today, the novel is still controversial: modern feminists tend to feel that The Woman Who Did is antifeminist in that Grant Allen’s real intention was to warn women of the consequences of transgressing the sexual status quo by showing the tragic end of Herminia’s idealism.

My aim was to try to answer certain questions associated with the novel’s context―what was Grant Allen’s attitude to women? how did he come to write the novel? why was it such a best-seller?―before coming to any conclusions about the author’s “real intention.”

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Links to recent publications by Nicholas Ruddick:

Broadview Edition (2004) of Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did

Broadview Edition (2001) of  H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine

Wesleyan UP “Early Classics in Science Fiction” edition (2003) of Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column

Introduction to anthology Images of Masculinity in Fantasy Fiction (2003)