[In the following excerpt, Sait discusses Ward's works of the First World War era.] Undoubtedly the Great War was recognised as the Great Subject by commercially minded writers of fiction and non-fiction. However, few writers achieved any major work in the battlefield and much of the non-combatant literature which did appear has suffered from critical neglect. Neither of the two major critical studies of literature in the Great War, Bernard Bergonzi's Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Li...

[Peterson is an American educator and critic who has written extensively about the poet Robert Browning. In the following excerpt, Peterson offers a detailed, volume-by-volume analysis of Ward's Robert Elsmere.] Archibald Tait once observed, 'The great evil is—that the liberals are deficient in religion and the religious are deficient in liberality.' This was the profound religious dilemma of the Victorian age to which Mrs Ward addressed herself in Robert Elsmere. How could a you...

[Gladstone was a prominent English statesman and author who served four times as Prime Minister and wrote numerous learned essays on such diverse subjects as politics, theology, classical history, and literature. In his literary criticism, Gladstone often uses criteria based on his deep commitments to Christian religious and moral beliefs to judge the plausibility of characters or actions. In the following excerpt from his influential, favorable review of Robert Elsmere, Gladstone challenges theological iss...

[In the following excerpt, Stewart examines Ward's theological novels.] There are few of [Mrs Ward's] books from which the religious interest is wholly absent, and there are at least five in which it may be said to predominate. Robert Elsmere is the best known, but in any such general survey we must not omit The History of David Grieve, Helbeck of Bannisdale, Eleanor, and The Case of Richard Meynell. The first point which calls for notice is one that all of these novels exhibit alike, and that...

[Colby is an American educator and critic who has written several studies of Victorian literature. In the following excerpt, she examines the appeal of Ward's works to Victorian readers.] It is a telling comment on Victorianism that one of its leading family dynasties was not Marlborough, Medici, Borgia, Fugger, or Rothschild, but Arnold. The founder of this line was not a warrior, a statesman, a banker, or a patron of the arts, but a clergyman and schoolmaster. Though some of his descendants practic...

[In the following excerpt, Phelps challenges Ward's high literary reputation.] It is high time that somebody spoke out his mind about Mrs. Humphry Ward. Her prodigious vogue is one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of our day. A roar of approval greets the publication of every new novel from her active pen, and it is almost pathetic to contemplate the reverent awe of her army of worshippers when they behold the solemn announcement that she is "collecting material" for another...

[An English author whose works often concern the city of London, Adcock served as editor of the London Bookman from 1923 until his death in 1930. In the following excerpt, he presents an appreciative survey of Ward's career to 1903.] To think over the successful problem or purposeful novels of the last fifteen years is to indulge in what is very much of a meditation among the tombs. Books of their week, of their season, of their year, selling in tens of thousands, read and discussed by everyone, extr...

[In the following excerpt, originally published in The Guardian in 1888, Pater praises characterization in Robert Elsmere but questions the validity of Elsmere's theological conversion in the novel.] Those who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for a little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on our own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere. A chef d'oeuvre of that kind of quiet evo...

[In the following excerpt, Culp considers the relationship between the artistic and the ideological in Robert Elsmere.] Two recent studies of the Victorian religious upheaval have drawn considerable attention to Robert Elsmere—published in 1888 by Mary Augusta Ward, the niece of Matthew Arnold and granddaughter of Rugby's Thomas Arnold. Neither of them, however, fully treats the issue of closure and ideological crisis in the novel. In Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian En...

[In the following excerpt, originally published in The Academy in 1894, Johnson reviews Marcella.] That Marcella is a good novel, and a very much better novel than Robert Eismere or David Grieve, would seem to be the unanimous verdict of its readers. It may be not amiss to consider the reasons of this clear superiority to its predecessors.

[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 ...

[In the following excerpt, Wagenknecht characterizes Ward's works as typifying conservative Victorian tastes in literature.] Life is always much less systematic than histories of literature; and there are currents and counter-currents in every period. During the latter end of Victoria's reign in England some writers were already giving their allegiance to the ideals of the age that was to come, while others, not necessarily inferior to them, were still finding their creative inspiration in the...

[Bennett was an Edwardian novelist who is credited with bringing techniques of European Naturalism to the English novel. He is best known as the author of The Old Wives' Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy (1910-1916), realistic novels depicting life in an English manufacturing town. In the following excerpt, originally published in New Age in 1908, he offers a negative appraisal of Ward's works, particularly criticizing the heroines of her novels.] That a considerable social importance &#x...

Bellringer, Alan W. "Mrs. Humphry Ward's Autobiographical Tactics: A Writer's Recollections." Prose Studies 8, No. 3 (December 1985): 40-50. Examines Ward's autobiography, which Bellringer credits with keeping "her reputation afloat" during the decades that her works were seldom discussed.

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 schoo...

Ward's works largely comprise moralistic considerations of various issues that engaged Victorian society. Her most famous novel, Robert Elsmere, details the theological crisis of an Anglican clergyman who renounces his faith and devotes himself to performing charitable works. In the story Elsmere is plagued by doubts regarding the miraculous underpinnings of Christian doctrine and finally settles on a simplified version of Christianity that rejects Christ's divinity. Elsmere resigns his countr...

Robert Elsmere created a sensation following a review by former prime minister William Gladstone in 1888, and Ward subsequently enjoyed great popular success. Victorian critics often challenged Ward's theoretical assumptions and arguments, but readers responded favorably to the combination of intellectual instruction, moral seriousness, and romantic appeal in her novels. As social attitudes and concerns changed in the Edwardian and Georgian eras of the early twentieth century, Ward's works wer...

Miss Bretherton (novel) 1884 Robert Elsmere (novel) 1888

Robert Elsmere is of course a masterpiece—a masterpiece of the 'genre ennuyeux,' the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of...

Ward was a popular and prolific novelist who is closely identified with the Victorian era in English life and literature. In her numerous novels she examined the social and moral issues that occupied Victorian readers, including women's role in society and the clash between science and evangelical theology. A dominant figure in late-Victorian public life who was known as much for her political activism and philanthropic activities as for her novels, Ward is chiefly remembered for providing a literary...

Jones, Enid Huws. Mrs. Humphry Ward. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973, 180 p. Appreciative biography. According to Jones, "Ward's life is not so much a story of literary development, success and decline as the story of seventy years of history lived through by a privileged, talented, zestful woman who told nearly all she saw."