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.
West, Rebecca. The Young Rebecca. Editor Marcus, Jane, Macmillan with Virago, http://UofA.
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—helped her to make a name for herself quickly.
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 ....
Literary responses
Sarah Grand
In an interview in 1895, SG
distinguished between her personal beliefs and those professed by her characters: The views of Evadne or Angelica . . . are not necessarily to be accepted as my views...
Literary responses
John Oliver Hobbes
Some early reviewers detected, despite the surface frivolity, a melancholic vein in her work:She wants you to mop your eyes, but your handkerchief should be of ample size, for while you weep she would...
Literary responses
Emily Brontë
Since the early criticism which took its lead from Charlotte's biographical portrait, a biographical and hagiographic industry has arisen around all three Brontë sisters and their home in Haworth. A. Mary F. Robinson
published...
Literary responses
Dora Marsden
The close friendship of these two was near its end. Letters on The Freewoman from Mary Augusta (Mrs Humphry) Ward
and Agnes Maude Royden
, a prominent member of the NUWSS
, were printed in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Caroline Clive
Despite the universal opinion that the sequel was decidedly weaker than the original, it nevertheless did well enough to go into several editions. The Saturday Review noted that it was a book which, even if...
Intertextuality and Influence
D. H. Lawrence
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.
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Friends, Associates
Annie S. Swan
She also mentions a great many literary names. Among women writers whom she calls the stars of her generation were Mary Augusta Ward
, Lucas Malet
, Lucy Clifford
, Sarah Grand
, Violet Hunt
Friends, Associates
Susan Tweedsmuir
ST
's parents made connections through friendship as remarkable as those made for them by family descent. Her mother was a friend of many writers and intellectuals of both sexes, including Marie Belloc Lowndes
,...
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...
ATR
wrote to Charlotte Yonge
a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press.