[The following excerpt assesses Ward's works from her early essays to the publication of The History of David Grieve.]

[Mrs. Ward's] popularity is a significant fact to the student of the English life of to-day. Not that any single page of hers is stamped with that seal of faithfulness and art that would make of it a historic document for time to come. But round all she has written there clings an aroma which distinctively belongs to the thought and ideals of a very large part of the national life. It lurks in her phrases, in her modes of thinking, and literary historians might well wish Mrs. Ward all the power with which her admirers credit her, that the durability of the material which secretes this flavour of our time might be ensured. Rightly understood, it reveals the mental condition of a far larger portion of the nation...