Alice Mona Alison was born in Ryde, Isle of Wight, as the elder daughter of John Alison of Midlothian, Scotland, who some biographies claim to have invented the vertical boiler, and Matilda Hector, who the 1871 census records state was born in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Her parents were married on 21 June 1853 in St Leonards, her father being based in Melbourne and her mother Matilda the eldest daughter of a prominent citizen. Caird wrote stories and plays from early childhood that reveal a proficiency in French and German as well as English. One childhood friend was the art critic Elizabeth Sharp, who married William Sharp. In December 1877, she married James Alexander Henryson-Caird, son of Sir James Caird. Her husband farmed some 1700 acres of estates in Cassencary, Scotland. Some eight years older, he supported her independence. While he lived at Cassencary and Northbrook House, Micheldever, Hampshire, she spent much time in London and abroad. She associated with literary people, including Thomas Hardy, who admired her work, and educated herself in much of the humanities and science. The Cairds had one child, a son born on 22 March 1884 with the names Alison James, but whom she called Alister. Her husband died in 1921. Caird published her first two novels, Whom Nature Leadeth and One That Wins, under the pseudonym "G. Noel Hatton", but they drew little attention. Her subsequent writings bore her own name. She came to prominence in 1888 when the Westminster Review printed a long article by her, "Marriage", in which she analysed indignities historically suffered by women in marriage and called its present state a "vexatious failure", advocating equality and autonomy of marriage partners. London's widely circulated Daily Telegraph quickly responded with a series called "Is Marriage a Failure?", which drew a reported 27,000 letters from around the world and continued for three months. Feeling that her views had been misunderstood, she published another article called "Ideal Marriage" later that year. Her numerous essays on marriage and women's issues written in 1888–1894 were collected in The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women in 1897. Caird next published the novelThe Wing of Azrael, which deals with the subject of marital rape. In it, Viola Sedley murders her cruel husband in self-defence. Next came a short story collection, A Romance of the Moors, where in the title story, a widowed artist, Margaret Ellwood, stirs up a young couple by counselling them to each become independent and self-sufficient. Her best-known novel, The Daughters of Danaus, tells of Hadria Fullerton, who aspires to become a composer, but finds that her obligations to her family and parents, and as a wife and mother, allow little time for it. This has since been seen as a feminist classic. Also well known is a short story "The Yellow Drawing-Room", where Vanora Haydon defies the conventional separation of spheres of men and women. Such works of hers have been called "fiction of the New Woman". Active in the women's suffrage movement from her early twenties, Caird joined the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1878, and later the Women's Franchise League, the Women's Emancipation Union, and the London Society for Women's Suffrage. Her essay "Why Women Want the Franchise" was read at the 1892 WEU Conference. In 1908, she published the essay "Militant Tactics and Woman's Suffrage" and took part in the second Hyde Park demonstration for women's suffrage. She was also actively opposed to vivisection, writing much on the subject, including "The Sanctuary of Mercy", "Beyond the Pale", "The Ethics of Vivisection", and a play, "The Logicians: An episode in dialogue", where characters argue opposing views on the issue. Caird was a member of the Theosophical Society from 1904 to 1909. Among her later writings is a large illustrated volume of travel essays, Romantic Cities of Provence, and novels The Stones of Sacrifice, which show harmful effects of self-sacrifice on women, and The Great Wave, a work of social science fiction that attacks the racist policies of negative eugenics. Mona Caird died on 4 February 1932, in Hampstead, at the age of 77.
