Grant Allen

Evolutionist, naturalist, atheist, socialist, Celtophile, armchair sexual radical, Grant Allen was one of the most prolific, versatile, and controversial men of letters in the Victorian fin de siècle. Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen was born on 24 February 1848 in Alwington, Canada West, now a suburb of Kingston, Ontario. His father was an Irish-born minister of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland; his mother came from a distinguished Canadian military family. In 1861 the Allens moved to Connecticut, and thereafter to Dieppe, France and Birmingham, England. When his family returned to Canada in 1866, Allen remained in England, entering Oxford University on a scholarship in 1867. In 1868 he married a woman of a lower social class who would die of tuberculosis in 1872. This first marriage, which caused Allen to lose his scholarship, may have been motivated by a desire to save his wife from the streets, and probably underlay his later determination to confront the problem of prostitution in his writings. In 1873 Allen married Ellen (Nellie) Jerrard; they would remain happily espoused until Allen’s death. Later that year Allen was appointed a professor at a new, short-lived college in Spanish Town, Jamaica. His (for their time) radical views on further education, gender roles, race, and colonialism were intensified by his Caribbean experience. From 1876 he was based in England, publishing his first book, Physiological Aesthetics, in 1877. In 1878 Nellie bore their only child, a son, and Allen found he could not support his family with scientific-philosophical writing. He expanded his literary scope to include popular fiction, and continued to write on an enormous variety of subjects. In a relatively short literary career blighted by ill health, he published about eighty books, including novels, short story collections, poetry, works on scientific subjects, collections of nonfiction essays, biographical and historical works, and travel guides. Much of his vast body of writing was ephemeral journalism and potboiling fiction. But his best-selling novel-with-a-purpose The Woman Who Did (1895) remains a landmark response to first-wave feminism, and he made pioneering contributions to scientific romance, horror, and detective fiction. And because he spoke eloquently for both progressive and transgressive elements in fin-de-siècle culture, his oeuvre and the records of his dealings with fellow-writers, editors, and publishers increasingly interest literary and social historians. Allen died at the age of 51 on 25 October 1899 at his home in Hindhead, Surrey.