Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House, Donaghadee, County Down, Ireland, of English parents.

When her father died, her mother took her and her siblings back to Bridlington, England to be near her family who lived at Rysome Garth near Holmpton in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Later works would have a more sympathetic stance to males, such as Babs the Impossible in which the single noble women would feel resurgence in their worth encouraged by an idealistic self-made man.

She used this knowledge in her 1893 novel The Heavenly Twins, warning of the dangers of syphilis, advocating sensitivity rather than condemnation for the young women infected with this disease.

[5][4] She lived briefly in London, then, after her husband's sudden death in February 1898, moved to Tunbridge Wells, Kent,[6] where her stepson writer and illustrator, Haldane MacFall came to lodge for several years with her.

[8] Her work dealt with the New Woman in fiction and also in fact; Grand wrote treatises on the subject of the failure of marriage, and her novels may be considered anti-marriage polemics.

[10] In The Heavenly Twins Grand demonstrates the dangers of the moral double standard which overlooked men's promiscuity while punishing women for the same acts.

More importantly, however, Grand argues in The Heavenly Twins that in order for the British nation to grow stronger, middle-class women must choose mates with whom they might produce strong, well-educated children.