Ralph Martin Wardle Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Ralph Martin Wardle

Ralph Wardle's biographies of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century British writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Hazlitt are characterized by a Firm grasp of biographical details and a careful attention to published and unpublished sources, while being less authoritative in the areas of literary interpretation and criticism. Clearly written and well organized, they are an excellent starting place for someone seeking a careful chronological accounting of events and personalities in these writers' lives, as well as a view of the writers from the perspective of other public literary and political Figures of the day.

Ralph Martin Wardle was born on 10 May 1909 in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, to Harry Hazlewood and Margaret Martin Wardle. He received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1931. After teaching at the Palo Verde Ranch School in Mesa, Arizona, from 1931 to 1933, he received his A.M. in English from Harvard University in 1934. In 1936 he received a Dexter Traveling Fellowship. That same year he married Mary Elizabeth McCullough; they had four children: Ruth Erskine, Alison Fife, Jean Fraser, and Nicholas Paine. Wardle was an instructor in English at the Municipal University of Omaha (now the University of Nebraska at Omaha) from 1938 to 1940; in the latter year he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard and became an instructor at Cornell University.

Wardle's First book, A Primer for Readers (1942), is an abridgement and simplification of Edward Tenney's Intelligent Reading (1938). In 1944 he became an associate professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; two years later he was named Jefferies Professor of English Literature.

Wardle's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951) makes extensive use of the Lord Abinger collection of Wollstonecraft's letters. In his preface Wardle says: "These letters came into the hands of the Abinger family from Lady Shelley. aunt and foster-mother of the present Lord Abinger's grandmother. Since they had previously been consulted only by Charles Kegan Paul ..., I was able to derive from them a good deal of information, both factual and interpretive, never available to biographers of Mary Wollstonecraft." His use of these previously unpublished letters of Wollstonecraft; her husband, the novelist and political theorist William Godwin; and her sister, Elizabeth Bishop, make the book the most comprehensive examination of the writer's life and literary output to the date of its publication. More recent biographies by Eleanor Flexner (1972) and Claire Tomalin (1979) have drawn heavily on Wardle's meticulous chronological account of Wollstonecraft's life, but rejected his interpretation of her Fiction and political writings. Wardle's book establishes a clear chronology of key events and people in Wollstonecraft's life; he writes with sympathy and understanding about her emotional dependence on male figures such as the painter Henry Fuseli, the American adventurer Gilbert lmley, and her adviser and publisher Joseph Johnson. The stages of Wollstonecraft's intellectual development are carefully examined, and her major political and feminist works are discussed. The book perpetuates Godwin's view of Wollstonecraft as a person torn between claims of the "head" and "heart": in Wardle's estimation, she lacked the "emotional maturity" to organize her ideas effectively and write about them with "detachment." Wardle's emphasis is on Wollstonecraft's independence of thought and action, her importance as a spokesperson for women's "natural rights to freedom and happiness," and her "originality" rather than her influence. Wardle paints a portrait of Wollstonecraft in which her political and intellectual life is severed from her personal life--a division most recent scholarship on Wollstonecraft denies.

In the slim volume Godwin and Mary (1966), Wardle gathers Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's letters in the Abinger collection, only about a quarter of which had been published previously. While it is a delightful record of the evolving friendship and love between Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the collection has been criticized by reviewers for its sketchy annotations. Few footnotes are provided to identify the contemporary Figures referred to in the letters.

Wardle's Oliver Goldsmith (1957) is still considered the authoritative source for information on the life of the poet, playwright, and novelist. Wardle makes extensive use of contemporary sources, literary reminiscences, and Goldsmith's published work to create a picture of a "philosophic vagabond" who "yearned for acceptance and approval" but sought to hide this need under a brash, indecorous, and uninhibited exterior. Goldsmith's public career is traced with great care and his intellectual development is tied closely to his personal experience. Wardle sees Goldsmith as a writer whose thematic concerns anticipated the Romantic revival but who adhered to a neoclassical diction. The Goldsmith biography has been well received, but there remain two significant reservations about the work: first, that it lacks an integrated or consistent depletion of Goldsmith's character and its expression in his published work; second, that it is less authoritative in its textual criticism and literary interpretations than in its grasp of significant biographical details.

Wardle received a Brooks Fellowship in literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, in 1966. His biography of William Hazlitt, published in 1971, is an effective attempt to let Hazlitt's writings create a complex and often contradictory self-portrait. Wardle's purpose is not to establish new "facts" about the writer but to present someone whose "character has fascinated me ever since I first read his essays." The book is more narrative than analytical and focuses on the machinations of Hazlitt's self-obsessive egotism. Wardle's view of the writer's character centers on Hazlitt's "longing for acceptance and fear of rejection," the elaborate self-absorbed paranoia and narcissism of his later years, and his recurring demands for personal and professional sympathy. Wardle is interested in the development of the "man as a writer ... with attention to the historical background or to [Hazlitt's] associates only when ... essential to understanding the man himself." Hazlitt's voluminous body of essays, lectures, and journalism is summarized and discussed within a chronological account of the writer's life; however, no attempts are made to link thematic ideas or stylistic techniques in Hazlitt's essays. While W. P. Albrecht in the Wordsworth Circle (Spring 1972) called the biography "among the three best biographies of Hazlitt," he was critical of Wardle's lack of attention to Hazlitt as a political journalist. Other critics have noted that the "I" in Hazlitt's essays cannot always be depended upon, that he is often self-dramatizing and self-deceiving. Hazlitt's aesthetic and critical writings are not given the close scrutiny by Wardle that they have been given by David Bromwich in Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (1983).

The University of Nebraska conferred on Wardle the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1975. He retired the following year, but continued to teach as an adjunct professor at Creighton University.

Wardle rectified the problems with his earlier edition of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin letters in his Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (1979). The volume has an introduction with a thorough documentation of the history of the letters, some of which had been previously published but had been heavily edited by Godwin and others. There are also two valuable appendices which describe Wollstonecraft's correspondents and her family situation. Moira Ferguson in the Wordsworth Circle (Summer 1980) has drawn attention to Wardle's "commanding editorial skills" and his fine critical introduction tracing Wollstonecraft's life.

During the 1970s and early 1980s Wardle published short articles on the Romantic prose writers Hazlitt, Thomas Moore, Charles Lamb, and Basil and Anna Montague. In 1981 he moved to Marion, Massachusetts, where he became English master at Tabor Academy. A planned biography of Lamb was left incomplete at Wardle's death on 12 February 1988.

Wardle's biographies of Wollstonecraft and Goldsmith are starting places for any reevaluation of those writers by literary critics. Wardle and other literary biographers, such as Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann, used the tools of modern textual scholarship, literary criticism, and psychology to bring their subjects alive and to give their readers insight into the creative process.