Victorian Lives

MRS HUMPHRY WARD

A Writer's Recollections 1918

with introduction, notes and index by
John Ballam

Mary Augusta Arnold, granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and niece of Matthew Arnold, married T. Humphry Ward in 1872, when she was twenty. He was a respected Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, who quickly became an established journalist, and in the convention of the time she used his name, continuing to do so as her work and reputation outstripped his. She became a hugely successful novelist and philanthopist, founding Somerville Hall (later College) for women at Oxford in 1879 and the Passmore Edwards Settlement, an adult education institute, in Bloomsbury in 1898. Her most well-known novel, Robert Elsmere (1888), brought her fame, high earnings, a life-style of large town and country houses, and hospitality given to and received from prime ministers and movers and shakers of the day.

A Writer's Recollections is Mary Ward's autobiography. Published two years before her death, it is her account of her Arnold family background, her intellectual development in the Oxford of Jowett, Newman, Pater and Mark Pattison, her friendships with authors such as Henry James, and her punishing writing schedule; and it ends at the time of the 1914-18 War with her opinions of Kipling, Bennett and Wells. She was an autocratic woman of strong and often disconcerting opinions, opposing both Home Rule for Ireland and - uncomfortably for readers today - votes for women. Like other Great Victorians, she believed that anything was possible; and her active involvement and influence in the political and social life of her time gave her writing its force and relevance. Her popularity as a novelist may be past, but her importance to literary and cultural history has remained.
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John Ballam is a Tutor in English at the University of Bristol. He provides a substantial introduction, notes and index. He is engaged on editions of Miss Bretherton (the first of Mary Ward's novels) and Robert Elsmere.

Publication October 2004

£30 $45

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