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Caird
1894
A gifted composer fights to keep her music from being poured, like water, into a vessel that never fills.
The Daughters of Danaus
Mona Caird · 1894
Mona Caird was one of the most controversial feminist voices of the 1890s, and The Daughters of Danaus is her fullest fictional case against marriage as then constituted: not a rejection of love, but an indictment of a system that asked women to pour their talent and ambition into domestic labor with no return, endlessly, like the mythic daughters of Danaus condemned to fill a bottomless vessel. Hadria Fullerton's fight to compose music against her family's and society's expectations gives the argument a human shape, and Caird appends her own 1899 essay on the same question at the novel's end — fiction and polemic, side by side.
52 chapters · 156,204 words · ~11.8 hr read
Contents
Chapters
One continuous story across fifty-one chapters — Hadria Fullerton's life on a remote Scottish moorland estate, her musical ambition, and the mounting pressure of marriage and family duty against it.
- 1Chapter 1~16 min
- 2Chapter 2~9 min
- 3Chapter 3~14 min
- 4Chapter 4~15 min
- 5Chapter 5~19 min
- 6Chapter 6~8 min
- 7Chapter 7~19 min
- 8Chapter 8~19 min
- 9Chapter 9~11 min
- 10Chapter 10~10 min
- 11Chapter 11~11 min
- 12Chapter 12~9 min
- 13Chapter 13~11 min
- 14Chapter 14~13 min
- 15Chapter 15~20 min
- 16Chapter 16~13 min
- 17Chapter 17~14 min
- 18Chapter 18~16 min
- 19Chapter 19~15 min
- 20Chapter 20~14 min
- 21Chapter 21~15 min
- 22Chapter 22~10 min
- 23Chapter 23~11 min
- 24Chapter 24~11 min
- 25Chapter 25~12 min
- 26Chapter 26~12 min
- 27Chapter 27~17 min
- 28Chapter 28~10 min
- 29Chapter 29~16 min
- 30Chapter 30~10 min
- 31Chapter 31~15 min
- 32Chapter 32~15 min
- 33Chapter 33~15 min
- 34Chapter 34~16 min
- 35Chapter 35~19 min
- 36Chapter 36~27 min
- 37Chapter 37~5 min
- 38Chapter 38~9 min
- 39Chapter 39~18 min
- 40Chapter 40~13 min
- 41Chapter 41~15 min
- 42Chapter 42~15 min
- 43Chapter 43~19 min
- 44Chapter 44~13 min
- 45Chapter 45~17 min
- 46Chapter 46~7 min
- 47Chapter 47~11 min
- 48Chapter 48~20 min
- 49Chapter 49~10 min
- 50Chapter 50~12 min
- 51Chapter 51~14 min
Appendix
Mona Caird's own 1899 essay, "Does Marriage Hinder a Woman's Self-development?", written for The Ladies' Realm and appended here as her direct, nonfiction answer to the question the novel dramatizes.