Mrs. Humphry Ward, born Mary Augusta Arnold, won worldwide recognition with the publication of Robert Elsmere (1888), which dramatized for countless readers the loss of faith in orthodox Christianity that resulted from the development of evolutionary science and historical criticism. Her total output--twenty-five novels, one children's book, three plays,three reports on World War I, an autobiography, a translation of a French mystic's journal, and numerous articles for reference books and leading periodicals--led many contemporaries to consider her the greatest living English author and supports the modern assessment that anyone wishing to understand England from 1880 to 1920 must have recourse to her work.

Mary Arnold was early introduced to the drama of men and women caught in the conflicts of religion, custom, and personality. In 1854, her father, Thomas Arnold, second son of Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby and brother of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, converted to Catholicism, largely...