Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Augusta Ward
-
Standard Name: Ward, Mary Augusta
Birth Name: Mary Augusta Arnold
Married Name: Mary Augusta Ward
Pseudonym: Mrs Humphry Ward
Best known for her influential loss-of-faith novel Robert Elsmere, MAW
was among the more prolific and popular novelists of the later Victorian and Edwardian periods. Her fifty-year career spanned an era of enormous transformation. During it she produced twenty-five novels, an autobiography, journalism (including reviews and literary criticism), a children's book, a translation, and several works of war propaganda. Her more serious earlier works were weighty novels of ideas in the tradition of George Eliot
, which seek to chart the complex relationships among character, intellect, religion, and morality. Her work insistently takes up what she sees as the pressing social issues of her day, shifting in the early twentieth century to briefer works on a much wider geographical canvas and then taking up the war effort in both fiction and prose. It displays an abiding interest in the social, intellectual, and sexual relations between men and women. The education and occupations of women are recurrent themes, and Oxford with its intellectual ferment a common setting. Although MAW
's nationalism, imperialism, and anti-suffrage stance cast her as conservative to recent readers, she was a reformer, in her earlier years a democrat, and an acute analyst of gender who believed strongly in the currents of progress and the transformative power of texts.
SM
's Canadian stories all feature the Canadian Pacific Railway
in some context or other: it was still quite a novel enterprise during the time of her visit.
Mary Augusta Ward
had recently published a...
Textual Features
Rose Macaulay
Like many of her other novels, this one, too, illustrates RM
's interest in conflicted religious choice. The father, Mr Garden, changes religion more than half a dozen times, dragging his long-suffering wife and family...
politics
Eliza Lynn Linton
In June 1889 ELL
publicly signed An Appeal Against Female Suffrage, written by Mary Augusta Ward
and published in Nineteenth Century.
Ward, Mary Augusta. “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage”. Nineteenth Century, Vol.
The Fox had been serialized in The Dial the previous year. Critic Esther Smith
has argued that the germ of this novella came from Mary Augusta Ward
's posthumous novel Harvest, April 1920.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
Following her mother's death, EL
lived at a farmhouse, Borough Farm at Thursley Common (now a nature reserve) in Surrey, although the exact dates of her time there are unknown. The farm had previously...
Literary responses
Emily Lawless
In a long assessment for the New Review, Mary Augusta Ward
also cited Loti, but pointed too at Spanish writers Fernan Caballero
and Perez Galdos
as exhibiting a similar care for landscape ....
Fictionalization
Lady Caroline Lamb
The other great love of her life, her husband, was equally productive for fictionalized versions of her character and doings. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography cites among novels dealing with her marriage Thomas Lister
Bloom, Abigail Burnham, editor. Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers. Greenwood Press.
223-4
Susanne Howe
notes that it anticipates later novels by Mary Augusta Ward
and J. A. Froude
, which also deal with spiritual doubt.
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
72
Beginning in...
Textual Features
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Monica Correa Fryckstedt
suggests that MJJ
's interest in religious doubt may have influenced her sister
's later novels, as well as those by Mary Augusta Ward
.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, II”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
67
, No. 1, The Library, pp. 450-73.
460-1
Friends, Associates
Henry James
HJ
's circle of acquaintance in the world of letters and the theatre was very wide. As well as men of letters such as Edmund Gosse
, it included a great many women writers, among...
Family and Intimate relationships
Aldous Huxley
The novelist Mary Augusta Ward
, who was godmother as well as aunt to Aldous (he was named after the hero of her Marcella, published three months before his birth), became even more important...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Aldous Huxley
Critic John Sutherland reads this story as a comment on AH
's relations with Mary Augusta Ward
, who was his aunt, godmother, and almost surrogate mother. In it the Greenow children are showered with...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Aldous Huxley
John Sutherland reads this as an indictment of Mary Augusta Ward
for the suicide of AH
's brother Trevenen. The hero, Brian Foxe, is driven to suicide by his mother, Mrs Foxe: she inculcates in...