The Daughters of Danaus
Glossary
"
- "Does Marriage Hinder a Woman's Self-development?"
- Mona Caird's own 1899 nonfiction essay for The Ladies' Realm, appended to the novel as its direct, non-fictional answer to the question the story dramatizes. It works by gender inversion: imagining a husband, "John," in the position of a devoted wife, forced to abandon a promising scientific discovery because his wife Sophia tells him he would be "more usefully... employed... attending to your children and your household duties" than experimenting in the back dining-room — exposing the double standard by simple role reversal.
- Related: The Daughters of Danaus (Myth), Hadria Fullerton
A
- Algitha Fullerton
- Hadria's elder sister and closest ally, first shown at twenty-two leaning "with crossed arms" in the garret window, marked by "pride and determination." She leaves the family's Scottish estate to do settlement work among the poor in London's East End, later marries the socialist Wilfrid Burton, and represents the novel's more clear-cut, action-oriented response to the same constraints Hadria feels — Algitha admits her judgments are "definite and clear-cut to the point of hardness" next to Hadria's more imaginative, nerve-strained temperament.
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, Wilfrid Burton, The East End
C
- Craddock Dene
- The English village where Hadria settles after marriage, centered on the Red House (rented from Professor Fortescue) and the neighboring Priory, which had stood empty since the previous Mrs. Fortescue's suicide in its drawing room. Village gossips Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Gullick supply the novel's running commentary on "Mrs. Temperley's" conduct, making Craddock Dene the site of Hadria's domestic confinement, in contrast to Dunaghee's wildness and Paris's freedom.
- Related: Hubert Temperley, Professor Fortescue, Dunaghee
D
- Dunaghee (The Tower of the Winds)
- The Fullerton family's ancestral home, an old fortified tower in a bleak, high, northern Scottish district, added onto over centuries and reachable only by an erratic farm track. Caird makes the setting formative: the narrator notes the "long mysterious hours" of northern twilight "had, perhaps, not been without its influence in the forming of Hadria's character," tying the landscape directly to her restless, visionary temperament.
- Related: The Preposterous Society, Craddock Dene
E
- Ernest Fullerton
- Hadria's brother and chief opponent in the opening Emerson debate — nicknamed "Demogorgon" within the Preposterous Society — who champions the optimistic view that will and character can always overcome circumstance, a position the novel's plot steadily undermines.
- Related: The Preposterous Society, The Emerson "Fate" Debate
F
- Fred Fullerton
- Hadria's brother, two years her junior, introduced with "irregular" features and "twinkling grey eyes suggesting a joyous and whimsical temperament." He is one of the family's core Preposterous Society members and remains one of Hadria's warmer, less judgmental siblings throughout the novel.
- Related: The Preposterous Society, Ernest Fullerton
H
- Hadria Fullerton
- The novel's protagonist, introduced dancing a reel by moonlight in her family's garret and presiding, as "Demogorgon's" opponent, over the secret debating club she founded with her siblings. Gifted with a serious musical talent, she spends the book caught between that ambition and the marriage, motherhood, and domestic duty her family and Victorian society expect of her — a conflict the novel frames through the myth of the Danaïdes, women condemned to pour water forever into a bottomless vessel.
- Related: The Daughters of Danaus (Myth), The Preposterous Society, Hubert Temperley
- Hadria's Paris Pursuit
- The stretch of the novel in which Hadria leaves her husband and children in England to study music seriously in Paris under the teacher Jouffroy, supporting herself precariously by writing articles while her compositions are repeatedly rejected by publishers. The section is the novel's most direct staging of its central question, ending when Henriette Temperley arrives to press her back toward her domestic "mission" and family pressure — including her mother's shame — eventually pulls her home.
- Related: Henriette Temperley, Valeria Du Prel, Hadria Fullerton
- Henriette Temperley
- Hubert's sister, who from her first appearance argues that women's ideas and ambitions dissolve under the weight of marriage's "cares and responsibilities." She later travels to Paris specifically to persuade Hadria to abandon her music and return home, telling her plainly "I am trying to keep them true to their noble mission" — the novel's clearest mouthpiece for the ideology Hadria is fighting.
- Related: Hubert Temperley, Hadria Fullerton
- Hubert Temperley
- The man Hadria marries, introduced discussing her with his sister Henriette, who assures him that "after a year of married life, a woman has too many cares and responsibilities to trouble about ideas." He rents the Red House at Craddock Dene from Professor Fortescue, commutes daily to his legal business in town, and comes to represent the well-meaning but conventional husband whose expectations of domestic normalcy collide with Hadria's ambitions.
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, Henriette Temperley, Craddock Dene
J
- Joseph Fleming
- A recurring figure in the Craddock Dene social circle, described as "intimate at the Red House" and present at most of the novel's drawing-room gatherings and debates. He functions as a barometer of conventional opinion, reliably siding with the traditional view of "Man, the sublime, the summit of creation" against Hadria's more skeptical arguments, and later brings news of Professor Fortescue's fatal decline in the novel's closing chapters.
- Related: Craddock Dene, Lady Engleton
L
- Lady Engleton
- A neighboring aristocrat at Craddock Dene who becomes one of Hadria's more sympathetic acquaintances despite embodying the conventional feminine role Hadria resists — her "mission in life" is treated by the county as "unfulfilled" until she bears an heir. Hadria's mixed feelings at the birth — Valeria Du Prel and Hadria both react with something close to disgust at the display of maternal pride — mark one of the novel's sharpest moments of dissent from the era's celebration of motherhood as a woman's sole purpose.
- Related: Craddock Dene, Hadria Fullerton
- Little Martha
- A village child at Craddock Dene, the daughter of a woman who died in poverty, whom Hadria takes under her protection and visits frequently — a relationship that scandalizes conventional neighbors and becomes one more point of friction with her mother, who considers it part of a pattern of impropriety alongside Hadria's East End sympathies and her time in Paris.
- Related: Craddock Dene, Hadria Fullerton
M
- M. Jouffroy
- Hadria's music teacher in Paris, introduced reluctantly agreeing to let her travel home alone and later revealing her whereabouts to Henriette Temperley when she comes searching for her sister-in-law. He represents the serious, professional musical world Hadria briefly enters and is forced to leave.
- Related: Hadria's Paris Pursuit, Hadria Fullerton
- Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton
- Hadria and Algitha's parents: a father "too exclusively scientific in his bent of thought" to sympathize with his children's speculative debates, and a mother who regards her daughters' "outbreaks of individuality" with "mingled pride and alarm," craving conventional social success for them instead. Mrs. Fullerton's own suppressed self-sacrifice becomes a cautionary point of reflection for Algitha late in the novel: "if mother had only not sacrificed herself for us, how infinitely grateful I should feel to her now."
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, Algitha Fullerton, Dunaghee
P
- Professor Fortescue
- The owner of the Red House and the Priory at Craddock Dene, a scientist whose wife killed herself years before the novel opens. He becomes one of Hadria's closest confidants and intellectual companions, and his slow death near the novel's end — attended by Hadria and Valeria Du Prel at the Priory where he spent his boyhood — gives the book its most sustained meditation on whether unfulfilled lives and apparent failure serve any larger purpose.
- Related: Craddock Dene, Valeria Du Prel
- Professor Theobald
- A recurring figure at Craddock Dene whose interactions with Hadria — including an encounter outside little Martha's cottage that leaves him visibly flustered — mark him as one of several men in the novel drawn to Hadria's independence while remaining unable to fully accept it on its own terms.
- Related: Craddock Dene, Hadria Fullerton
T
- The Daughters of Danaus (Myth)
- The novel's governing image, drawn from Greek myth: the fifty daughters of Danaus, condemned in the underworld to pour water eternally into a vessel that can never be filled. Caird uses it as a figure for women's domestic labor under Victorian marriage — endless, exhausting, and structurally incapable of producing lasting result. The image surfaces explicitly late in the book when Algitha observes that "women will go on patiently drawing water in sieves, and pretend they are usefully employed because it tires them."
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, "Does Marriage Hinder a Woman's Self-development?"
- The East End
- The impoverished London district where Algitha does settlement and welfare work before her marriage, and which recurs as the novel's counter-example to the drawing-room world of Craddock Dene — Algitha invokes "all those millions in the East End" and the wasted talent among them as proof that circumstance, not just character, determines whether ability ever comes to fruition, directly echoing the novel's opening Emerson debate.
- Related: Algitha Fullerton, Wilfrid Burton
- The Emerson "Fate" Debate
- The novel's opening set piece: Hadria's lecture to the Preposterous Society arguing against Emerson's claim that "man makes his circumstance" and that a strong enough soul can always overcome adverse conditions. She counters that circumstance is shaped by "destroyers" — the inert, conforming majority who resist and drag down what "organizers" build — and that the greater a person's gift, the greater the obstacles it provokes, a thesis the rest of the novel tests directly against her own life.
- Related: The Preposterous Society, Hadria Fullerton, The Neglected Gift
- The Neglected Gift
- The novel's recurring figure for Hadria's musical talent once domestic duty has crowded out its practice for years: by the book's final chapters it is described as "beginning to show signs of decay and enfeeblement," having "given fair warning for many a year, by the persistent appeal that it made, the persistent pain that it caused," until "the famine had told upon it at last." It is the novel's starkest evidence for its thesis that self-development, once foreclosed, may not simply resume when circumstances later permit it.
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, The Daughters of Danaus (Myth)
- The Preposterous Society
- The secret debating club the Fullerton siblings hold in the garret of their Scottish tower house, complete with mock-formal titles (Hadria addresses her brother Ernest as "Demogorgon") and real philosophical stakes. The novel opens with its debate over Emerson's claim that "the soul contains the event that shall befall it" — Hadria arguing that circumstance, not just character, determines fate, an argument the rest of the novel tests against her own life.
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, Dunaghee
V
- Valeria Du Prel
- A writer and one of Hadria's key allies and correspondents, who helps place Hadria's articles with publishers during her time in Paris and who "had always made light of" the difficulty of a woman earning her own living, sustained by "the theory of the sovereignty of the will." She stands with Hadria at Professor Fortescue's deathbed in the novel's final chapters.
- Related: Hadria Fullerton, Professor Fortescue, Paris
W
- Wilfrid Burton
- A socialist whom Algitha meets through her East End settlement work and eventually marries, over her father's objection to his politics — Mr. Fullerton, the novel notes, "insisted on holding Wilfrid Burton responsible for every sort of theory that had ever been attributed" to socialists, communists, anarchists, and nihilists alike. The couple marry with minimal ceremony, valuing only "the tie of our love and faith" over the "barbaric show" of convention.
- Related: Algitha Fullerton, The East End