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.
During the last weeks of 1878 and through till spring 1879, EMwrote at a white heat, after the bankruptcy of the West of England Bank
had made her earnings suddenly vital to her family...
Publishing
Rebecca West
RW
initiated the pseudonym under which she became famous with her second article in The Freewoman: The Gospel According to Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Rollyson, Carl. Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century. Hodder and Stoughton.
19
Hutchinson, G. Evelyn. A Preliminary List of the Writings of Rebecca West, 1912-1951. Yale University Library.
36
West, Rebecca. The Young Rebecca. Editor Marcus, Jane, Macmillan with Virago, http://UofA.
14-17
Publishing
Beatrice Harraden
BH
set her name to the earliest of her several letters to the Times, this one together with Hertha Ayrton
and Mary Augusta Ward
, as an effort to raise money for a building...
Reception
Marie Corelli
Barabbas sold extremely well. It was translated into Farsi, Greek, Hindi, and Russian, among other languages. Critics were, however, unrelenting: some thought MC
heretical for supposing herself worthy of rewriting the gospel, while others just...
Residence
Harriet Martineau
She designed it herself, and her recently-acquired friend Wordsworth
planted a tree in the grounds. (He also pitched in with her farming experiments.) The house was opposite Fox How, where her friend Thomas Arnold
Residence
Emily Lawless
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...
Textual Features
Rhoda Broughton
This novel begins with the death of Althea Vane's father, and her mother's subsequent decision to escape from her conventional role and abandon her children,
Jones, Shirley et al., editors. “’LOVE’: Rhoda Broughton, Writing and Re-writing Romance”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, Manchester University Press, pp. 208-36.
223
thereby effectively orphaning Althea and her three sisters. Two...
Textual Features
Susan Miles
She dedicated the volume to her mother, who had died a year before publication, in a poem that likens the book to a blotted and tear-stained letter she wrote as a child when her mother...
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
Textual Features
Ivy Compton-Burnett
The protagonist, a clergyman's daughter, lives up to her name. She is a child at her mother's graveside in the book's opening scene: by the age of thirty-three she has repeatedly sacrificed her hopes of...
Textual Features
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Imperialist features a double-stranded plot focusing on a Canadian brother and sister. Lorne Murchison pursues a connection with Britain through formal trade agreements while Advena Murchison unites the countries with bonds of affection when...
Textual Features
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
The chapters which follow these address the difficulties in the suffrage campaign that were brought about by women themselves. A chapter on the anti-suffragists explains the thinking of a group of women led by Mrs Humphry Ward
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...
Textual Production
Emma Frances Brooke
EFB
, as the Author of A Superfluous Woman, published Transition. A Novel, which connects feminist and socialist themes and which she intended as an antidote to Marcella by Mrs Humphry Ward
...