Discussing Editor Riya Das and His Critical Edition of Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus: An Interview

Riya Das, an Assistant Professor of English at Prairie View A&M University, has recently edited and published a critical edition of Mona Caird's novel The Daughters of Danaus, which was first published in 1894 and has been out of print for several decades.

Das's first book, Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature, published in 2024 by The Ohio State University Press, explores the themes of female antagonism and indifference as tools for women's progress in late-Victorian novels. This scholarly work served as a natural fit for editing Caird's novel, as it resonated deeply with Das.

The Daughters of Danaus is a narrative of female professionalization, focusing on the characters of Hadria and Algitha Fullerton, who navigate from domesticity toward professional work. The novel is filled with references to scientific, agricultural, artistic, and financial advances and setbacks of the nineteenth century.

In the introduction to the critical edition, the scholar argues that while critics have largely viewed Hadria as the novel's New Woman, it is Algitha who represents the pragmatic ideal of the New Woman more distinctly. The portrayal of the New Women in the novel is reevaluated, offering a fresh perspective for modern readers.

The critical edition of The Daughters of Danaus offers readers an editorial apparatus including footnotes and an appendix containing a selection of Caird's essays about marriage, patriarchy, motherhood, and vivisection. This edition also marks the first critical edition and the first twenty-first century reprint of Caird's novel.

Das's research for the critical edition figuratively took her to various unexpected and unusual scholarly realms. One of the unusual subjects she had to research was "hen fever" - the nineteenth-century obsession with breeding exotic chickens.

The scholar worked on the critical edition full-time for the first six months of 2024 with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The critical edition encourages academic distraction through the task of footnote preparation, as Das delved deep into the world of The Daughters of Danaus.

Das's next monograph project, tentatively titled Victorian Transgressions, explores how the genealogy of social reform associated with late-Victorian fiction can be traced from mid-century narratives. This project was a finalist in the American Council of Learned Societies HBCU Faculty Fellowship competition in 2024.

For more information about Riya Das's work, visit her personal website online. The scholar's personal answer for editing Caird's novel was that they were bowled over by Caird's elegant and complex style and scathing humor when they read the novel on a whim in the early 2010s.

Discussing Editor Riya Das and His Critical Edition of Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus: An Interview