The Woman Who Did

In 1895, this scandalous book titled The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen promulgating certain startling views on marriage and kindred questions, became a bestseller. The book told the story of an independent, young, self-assured middle-class woman who has a child out of wedlock.

Herminia Barton, Cambridge-educated daughter of the Dean of Dunwich, is more determined than most to arrange her own life. She accordingly enters into a relationship outside marriage with one of her own free and advanced kind, the lawyer Alan Merrick.

• The consequences of that decision test her resolve to the very limit.
• The author was sympathetic to the feminist cause and saw his novel as a means to propagate womens rights.

However, the novel was controversial right from the start, with conservative readers as well as feminists criticizing Allen for the heroine he had invented.