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.
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...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Family and Intimate relationships
Walter Pater
WP
was particularly close to his unmarried sisters. Both women were accomplished in their own right. The elder sister, Hester
, became known as a talented embroiderer and friend to Mary Augusta Ward
and Virginia Woolf
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.
242
She uttered...
Friends, Associates
A. Mary F. Robinson
In June 1881 Vernon Lee
stayed with AMFR
's family in London. The next month the friends visited Oxford with Mary's sister Mabel
. Their Oxford social life included attending a dinner party hosted by...
Textual Production
A. Mary F. Robinson
In the same year, 1894, AMFR
contributed critical introductions to selections by Felicia Hemans
and Joanna Baillie
in The English Poets, edited by Humphry Ward
(husband of the well-known novelist
).
Robinson, A. Mary F. et al. “Critical Introductions”. The English Poets, edited by Thomas Humphry Ward, New Edition, Macmillian, pp. 4: 221 -34.
4: ix-x
politics
F. Mabel Robinson
FMR
became deeply interested in political debates and struggles around the issue of home rule for Ireland, and went so far as to carry secret messages back and forth between England and Ireland. This...
politics
Christina Rossetti
Notwithstanding these affiliations, however, she declined to support women's suffrage when requested by Augusta Webster
around 1878. In a letter to Webster she stated: I do not think the present social movements tend on the...
Friends, Associates
Maude Royden
At Alderly, MR
met novelist and anti-suffragist Mrs Humphry Ward
, who attended Alderly Church and who admired Shaw. She was later to disagree publicly with Ward over the latter's anti-suffragism. Another friend, Constance Todd Coltman
politics
Maude Royden
In 1912, MR
wrote two letters to the editor of the Times to defend the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies
and its publications against the critical judgements of the well-known anti-suffragist writer Mary Augusta Ward
politics
May Sinclair
Unlike many suffragists, MS
was a decided supporter of the war. With three other women (Jane Ellen Harrison
, Flora Annie Steel
, and Mary Augusta Ward
) she signed the Authors' Declaration to...
Occupation
Constance Smedley
Since the Langham Place Group
had provided a social space for women in 1860, several organizations had already challenged the flourishing institution of men's clubs. The Lyceum Club
came on the scene at a time...
Friends, Associates
Freya Stark
Through her association with Jeyes, FS
met such literary figures as H. G. Wells
and W. B. Yeats
. She also campaigned for the Anti-Suffrage League
and met key figures in the group, including its...