Sarah Grand was born
Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House,
Donaghadee,
County Down, Ireland, of English parents. Her father was Edward John Bellenden Clarke (1813–1862) and her mother was Margaret Bell Sherwood (1813–1874). When her father died, her mother took her and her siblings back to
Bridlington, England to be near her family who lived at Rysome Garth near
Holmpton in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Grand's education was very sporadic, yet she managed with perseverance to make a career for herself as an activist and writer, drawing on her travels and life experiences. In 1868 Grand was sent to the
Royal Naval School,
Twickenham, but was soon expelled for organizing groups that supported
Josephine Butler's protests against the
Contagious Diseases Act, which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the sole cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, subjecting them to indignities such as inspection of their genitals and enclosure in locked hospital wards. Grand was then sent to a
finishing school in
Kensington, London. In August 1870, at the age of sixteen, she married widowed Army surgeon David Chambers McFall, who was 23 years her senior and had two sons from his previous marriage:
Chambers Haldane Cooke McFall and Albert William Crawford McFall. Grand and McFall's only child, David Archibald Edward McFall, was born in
Sandgate, Kent, on 7 October 1871. He became an actor and took the name Archie Carlaw Grand. From 1873 to 1878 the family travelled in the Far East, providing Grand with more material for her fiction. In 1879 they moved to
Norwich, and in 1881 to
Warrington, Lancashire where her husband retired. Upon returning to England, she and her husband became sexually estranged by her husband's bizarre sexual appetites. Grand felt constrained by her marriage. She turned to writing, but her first novel,
Ideala, self-published in 1888, enjoyed limited success and some negative reviews.
George Gissing who read the novel in April 1889 wrote in his diary that he found it 'on the whole an interesting book but crude in parts and without much style'. Nevertheless, she trusted in her new career to support her in her decision to leave her husband in 1890 and move to London. Recently enacted laws that allowed women to retain their personal property after marriage were an encouraging factor in her decision. She used her experience of suffocation in marriage and the joy of consequent liberation in her fictional depictions of pre-suffrage women with few political rights and options, trapped in oppressive marriages. Later works would have a more sympathetic stance to males, such as
Babs the Impossible in which the single noble women would feel resurgence in their worth encouraged by an idealistic
self-made man. Through her husband's work as an army surgeon, Grand learned of the anatomical physiology of the nature of
sexually transmitted diseases. She used this knowledge in her 1893 novel
The Heavenly Twins, warning of the dangers of
syphilis, advocating sensitivity rather than condemnation for the young women infected with this disease. == Rebirth as Sarah Grand and her later life and death==