Mary Augusta Ward

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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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Aldous Huxley
When Aunt Mary (aunt of the protagonist, Will Farnaby) dies horribly and bitterly of cancer, full of a hatred quite unlike her former, characteristic charity and courage, Sutherland reads her as a blend of...
Travel Vernon Lee
VL was at this time a guest of Mary Robinson and her family. She combined her connections with theirs in order to meet a number of major cultural figures: Sir Leslie Stephen , Robert Browning
Travel Gertrude Bell
During 1899 GB visited Mrs Humphry Ward in Rome. She also went to Athens with her father, where they watched David Hogarth working on an archaeological dig. She went home via Constantinople, Prague...

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