Sarah Grand was an Irish feminist writer in the early1900"s. Her works dealt with the New Woman in fiction and in fact. She wrote treatises on the subject of the failure of marriage, and her novels are strongly anti-marriage polemics. Ideala was written in 1888. "She came among us without flourish of trumpets. She just slipped into her place, almost unnoticed, but once she was settled there it seemed as if we had got something we had wanted all our lives, and we should have missed her as you would miss the thrushes in the spring, or any other sweet familiar thing. But what the secret of her charm was I cannot say. She was full of inconsistencies. She disliked ostentation, and never wore those ornamental fidgets ladies delight in, but she would take a piece of priceless lace to cover her head when she went to water her flowers."