[Mrs. Frances Elizabeth (Clarke) McFall]. English novelist, writing under the pseudonym, “Sarah Grand”; born at Donaghadee, in the North of Ireland, of English parents. After the death of her father, which occurred when she was very young, her mother settled in Yorkshire, and she was sent to school, first at Twickenham, and later in Holland Road, Kensington. At sixteen she married an army officer, and afterward accompanied him to Ceylon, China and Japan. She began writing when she was very young, her first published story appearing in Aunt Judy, a girls’ magazine. After this she wrote the highly overstrained and rather improbable novel, Singularly Deluded, which was published by Messrs. Blackwood. In 1888 appeared her Ideala, a problem story, treating of the marriage question, and a sort of prelude to her Heavenly Twins, which appeared in 1893. Ideala was refused by the publishers, and printed at the author’s own expense. The Heavenly Twins fared in the same manner; but, after it had already come from the press, the risk of its publication was assumed by the printer. The novel, despite its three volumes and its didactic purpose, was immediately successful. The book, written in a desultory style, with much description and little continued action, is intended as a protest against the injustice of society which permits or ignores lapses from morality before marriage on the part of the man, but metes out its severest condemnation for such on the woman. She published in 1894 a collection of her shorter stories under the title, Our Manifold Nature. See also “Marriage as a Temporary Arrangement.”
