Ward was the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the influential headmaster of Rugby School, and the niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold. Her father, also named Thomas Arnold, moved to New Zealand in 1847 and later accepted a position as a school inspector in Tasmania, where he married Julia Sorrell and where Ward was born in 1851. Ward's father resigned his post in 1856 after his religious conversion to Roman Catholicism and moved his family to England. Ward attended a series of boarding schools and joined her family in Oxford in 1865, when her father became a tutor there during a temporary return to Protestantism. In Oxford, Ward pursued independent studies, particularly in Spanish history, and later contributed sketches on that subject to a biographical reference work. Through her family Ward became acquainted with leading intellectuals and philosophers at Oxford University, among them Walter Pater, Mark Pattison, and T. H. Green. In 1872 she married Thomas Humphry Ward, an academic, and subsequently moved with him to London. During the 1870s Ward contributed articles on literature and history to such periodicals as Macmillan 's, the Saturday Review, and the Pall Mall Gazette and began her prolific career as a novelist with the publication of Miss Bretherton in 1884. In addition to writing, Ward devoted much of her time to volunteer work and helped to found the Passmore Edwards Settlement, later renamed in her honor, a social aid facility that provided vocational training, child-care assistance, and social activities for the poor in London's Bloomsbury district. She headed the Women's Anti-Suffrage League in opposing the right of women to vote, believing that women's influence in political matters could be better achieved through alternate means. During the First World War, Ward championed the British cause in journalistic writings and in 1918 published her autobiography. She died in 1920.
This is a free excerpt of 305 words. There are 309 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Mrs. Ward, Humphry 1851-1920: Critical Essay by Biographical Information Access Pass.
