Liberating Conversations John Stuart Mill and Mona Caird解放对话和.pdfVIP

Literature Compass 9/11 (2012): 873–883, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2012.00911.x Liberating Conversations: John Stuart Mill and Mona Caird Demelza Hookway* University of Exeter Abstract This essay considers how the New Woman writer Mona Caird engaged with John Stuart Mill’s ideas on liberty of discussion. It offers a brief history of Caird scholarship and considers the impor- ` tance of free discussion to fin-de-sie cle New Woman debates. It outlines four elements of Millian philosophy which Caird draws on in her fictional depictions of conversation: male-female friend- ship, independent thought, self-development, and a quest for precision in word choice and usage. Finally, it traces these elements through Caird’s novels and short stories, charting a development from her nineteenth-century fiction – which focuses on private discussion in upper-class domestic settings – to her twentieth-century novels – which consider directly how private conversational practices translate into political and scientific discussion groups open to a greater diversity of par- ticipants. Mona Caird was an essayist and novelist who became well known at the end of the nine- teenth century for her unflinching criticism of marriage laws and customs in an article for the Westminster Review entitled ‘Marriage’ (1888). Caird’s controversial article initiated a thoroughgoing nationwide debate about the marriage question, conducted through the letters columns of the Daily Telegraph and other national publications.1 In 1910, the writer and editor Elizabeth A. Sharp declared that Caird’s essays and novels ‘have been potent in altering the attitude of the public mind in its approach to and examination of such questions, in making private discussion possible’ (142). Caird not only encouraged debates about marriage during the 1880s and 1890s, she made liberty of discussion one