Articulately summarised by Stetz and Lasner: “The woman who did what? No reader of the Nineties needed help in completing that phrase. If Thomas Hardy had shocked the public in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) by daring to call a victim of rape “a pure woman”, Grant Allen outraged it by asserting that his protagonist, who deliberately chose to live with the man she loved and to bear a child out of wedlock, was not merely a pure woman, but a noble one. Allen’s heroine, Herminia Barton, was the embodiment of everything that the still conservative part of the Victorian audience both feared and found titillating – a religiously brought up young lady … who had gone to Girton College, developed “emancipated views”, and now insisted upon acting on them. Melodramatic and often sentimental, Allen’s novel brought to life the anti-marriage diatribes that had continued to appear in the popular press since the late Eighties, when Mona Caird had published her denunciation of the institution.” (Stetz and Lasner, p.46). The Woman Who Did is often discussed alongside Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – which was published the same year – as both novels deal with the institution of marriage in Victorian England, and the disastrous repercussions for those who live outside the accepted matrimonial framework. Herminia Barton, in Allen’s work, is middle-class, Girton educated, and rebels against her parents’ expectations by living independently in London and working as a teacher. She falls in love with a lawyer, Alan Merrick, who she persuades into an unmarried partnership, as it is in line with her beliefs. She declares that marriage is “degradation”, and by choosing to enter into an unmarried relationship with a man she loves she is acting “from principle, and principle only”, something she believes is “for the good of [our] sex” [pp.44–6]. A noble idea, but one that swiftly shows how unprotected unmarried mothers were: when Merrick dies shortly before the birth of their child, Herminia has no claim or access to his money. She lives, unrepentant, as a single mother, hoping to show her daughter and the younger generation that one must make small steps in order to begin to address and redress the injustices experienced by women in a patriarchal world. Unfortunately, her daughter is greatly affected by the social stigma associated by her mother’s and her own condition, and so, Herminia, finally takes her own life to free her daughter from society’s judgement. The Woman Who Did was a runaway success commercially, although it had its detractors on both sides of the fence (both conservative readers and feminists).
Near fine.
