Mona Caird was one of the most controversial of the New Woman writers, those whose fiction in the final decade of the nineteenth century challenged traditional thinking about women, depicting the restricted lives they led and the legal and social injustices from which they suffered. Caird, who used both her essays and her novels to promote her ideas, was largely responsible for beginning the great marriage debate that raged throughout the 1890s in fiction and journals. In her article "Marriage," published in the Westminster Review in August 1888, Caird boldly declared that respectable marriage is "the most hypocritical form of woman-purchase" and concluded that "the present form of marriage--exactly in proportion to its conformity with orthodox ideas--is a vexatious failure." Her controversial ideas provoked a tremendous response, including expressions of outrage.

While Caird was attacked by critics who said she was part of the so-called Anti-Marriage League (an epithet...