Mrs. Humphry Ward Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian

by Sutherland, John

• ISBN13: 9780198185871
• ISBN10: 0198185871
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1990-10-18
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Victorian novelist Mary Ward, best known to her contemporaries as Mrs. Humphry Ward, was one of the most successful and complex women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into the powerful but patriarchal dynasty of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, she lived at the center of an intellectual and cultural circle peopled by such eminent figures as Mark Pattison, Thomas Huxley, and Charles Darwin. Her novel Robert Elsmere (1888), the first in a series of bestsellers, earned her both unprecedented sums of money and the critical respect of such writers as Henry James. She helped found Somerville College, Oxford, the University's first institution of higher education of women, and helped create a number of play centers for the children of London's working poor. And as the first woman reporter to enter the trenches in 1916, she wrote articles that were instrumental in bringing America into the war. In Mrs. Humphry Ward , John Sutherland explores a goldmine of materials never before available to recapture a fascinating life, one in which extraordinary achievements were often overshadowed by private misfortune. Sutherland describes how Ward's parents' marriage was shattered by her father's religious peregrinations (an Anglican, he converted to Roman Catholicism, then returned to the Church of England, then became a Catholic again), how her own remarkable success placed considerable stress on her marriage, and how all her resources (both financial and emotional) went to support a renegade, spendthrift, and disappointing son. And he also sheds light on one of the great paradoxes of this accomplished woman's life--that she led the fight to block woman's suffrage. Throughout, Sutherland writes movingly of the private life of a remarkable public figure. A fascinating study of how much a woman could and could not do in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this engaging biography illuminates the intellectual climate of the late 19th century.

Author Biography

John Sutherland is Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. he is a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and is the author of numerous books.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

The girlhood of Mary Arnold: 1851-1860

Schooldays: 1860-1867

Oxford: 1867-1871

Stabs at fiction: 1867-1871

Marriage: 1870-1872

Marriage and Oxford: 1872-1878

Fighting back: 1878-1880

London: 1880-1886

The right book: 1883-1884

The Elsmere ordeal: 1884-1888

Elsmere mania: 1888

The fiction machine: 1890-1900

Families - the Arnolds: 1890-1900

Families - the Wards: 1890-1900

Homes: 1888-1900

Respectable genius: 1890-1900

Health: 1890-1900

The Passmore Edwards settlement: 1892-1900

Eleanor: 1900

Best-selling novelist, failed dramatist: 1901-1905

Family matters: 1900-1905; Mid-Edwardian: 1906; The Testing of Diana Mallory: 1907

The new world: 1908

Anti-suffragist: 1909

Arnold Ward, MP: 1910-1911

Calamities: 1912-1914

The Wards and war: 1914-1917

Soldier in skirts: 1916-1917

The end: 1918-1920

Notes

Chronology of Mary Ward

Select bibliography

Index

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