Ideala

A woman in a bad marriage refuses to be consoled, sets up on her own terms and thinks aloud about what women are permitted — and the club of friends around her cannot follow her all the way. Grand was born Frances Clarke, left an unhappy marriage to write, and in 1894 gave the age its keyword: the New Woman. This was her first novel, and Ideala is the sketch from which she built everything after. Fifty-nine plates from Walter Sickert and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, among others, run from 1809 to 1927, matching the novel's own passage from Victorian parlor to the modern woman's independence.