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Mary Ward: Fiction, Divorce and Inequality

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Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy

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Abstract

As Edwardian British women’s views on their roles within society began to encroach on the reputation and popularity of the persona of ‘Mrs Humphry Ward’ as a fictional writer, she became a target for the contempt of a younger generation of writers. Virginia Woolf claimed Mary’s writing was ‘as great a menace to health of mind as influenza to the body’ and that her views were that of a generation of those who inhabited ‘the stuffed world of the first class railway carriage’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1915–1919, pp. 166, 211.

  2. 2.

    Green’s concept of moral progress is outlined in Chapter 3.

  3. 3.

    Walters, Mrs Humphry Ward: Her Work and Influence, pp. 63–64.

  4. 4.

    Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 163–164.

  5. 5.

    Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, p. 3.

  6. 6.

    John Sutherland, “Was Ma Hump to Blame?” London Review of Books 24, no. 13 (2002); Gisela Argyle, “Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (2006).

  7. 7.

    A. W. Bellringer, “Mrs Humphry Ward’s Autobiographical Tactics: A Writer’s Recollections,” Prose Studies 8, no. 3 (1985): 40.

  8. 8.

    Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, p. 3. This review was published in The Bookman, 1918.

  9. 9.

    ‘Rebecca West’ (Cicely Fairfield 1892–1983) was considered to be a brilliant literary critic. For a discussion of West’s attacks on Mary, see Stefan Collini, “Rebecca West: Battle-Axe and Scalpel,” The Guardian, 2008.

  10. 10.

    West does not state which Kingsley, but it is presumed from the context of the article that she refers to Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) who was a novelist, historian and a priest of the Church of England, Rebecca West, “The Gospel According to Mrs Humphry Ward,” The Freewoman (1912), http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=1301604112796876&view=pageturner&pageno=10.

  11. 11.

    Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1915–1919; Maroula Joannou, “Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry) and the Opposition to Women’s Suffrage,” Women’s History Review 14, no. 3 (2005): 563.

  12. 12.

    Valerie J. Shepherd, “Whirlwinds of Thought and Ferments of Mind: The Process of Personal Change in Mrs Humphry Ward” (PhD diss., University of Liverpool, 2006), p. 234.

  13. 13.

    A. O. Bell, ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1920–1924, 5 vols., vol. 2 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978). p. 29.

  14. 14.

    Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, p. 114.

  15. 15.

    Gosse, “Mrs Humphry Ward,” p. 210.

  16. 16.

    Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, “The Slayer and the Slain: Women and Sacrifice in Mary Ward’s ‘Eleanor’,” South Atlantic Review 52, no. 4 (1987); “The Personal Is Poetical: Feminist Criticism and Mary Ward’s Readings of the Brontës,” Victorian Studies 34, no. 1 (1990); Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Athens, OH and UK: Ohio University Press, 2004).

  17. 17.

    See Appendix 3 for a note of Mary’s works, arranged thematically.

  18. 18.

    Mrs Humphry Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter, vol. X, Autograph Edition (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910). This novel was a huge success in Britain. It was first published as a series of twelve parts in Harper’s Monthly Magazine from May 1902. A complete collection of these serialised editions is held in the Armitt Museum, catalogued as: The Armitt Trust, AMATL: A2044, Lady Rose’s Daughter. Sutherland notes in his biography that it was performed on Broadway in 1903 (p. 239). The book was made into a silent film in 1920. The leading role of Julie Le Breton was played by a highly successful American actress, Elsie Ferguson but none of her silent movie footage has come to light. For details, see Internet Movie Database, “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011383/.

  19. 19.

    Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter, X.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., p. 32.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 28.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., p. 39.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 40.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., pp. 353–368.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., p. 427.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., p. 505.

  27. 27.

    Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, §203.

  28. 28.

    Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter, X, p. 428.

  29. 29.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §215–216.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., §221.

  31. 31.

    These characters are discussed in Chapter 4.

  32. 32.

    Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter, X, Introduction, pp. x–xi.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., p. 506.

  34. 34.

    Ibid.

  35. 35.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §237.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., §239.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., §242.

  38. 38.

    Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was originally published in instalments by between 1883 and 1887. It was first published into English in 1886 by Nathan Haskell Dole but his work was hurried and considered lacking because he was American and not a native Russian speaker.

  39. 39.

    Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter, X, pp. 25, 24.

  40. 40.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §243.

  41. 41.

    “The Witness of God (1870)”; Richter, Politics, pp. 108–109.

  42. 42.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §245.

  43. 43.

    The novel is included in volume one in Mrs Humphry Ward, Daphne, or Marriage À La Mode (1911), ed. A. Heilmann, L. Delap, and S. Thomas, 5 vols., Anti-Feminism in Edwardian Literature (Thoemmes Continuum, 2006). It was serialised in six parts in McClure’s Magazine from January, 1909. In America, it was published as Daphne, or Marriage À La Mode.

  44. 44.

    Daphne, vol. XV, Autograph Edition (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), p. 8.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., Introduction, p. xiv.

  46. 46.

    Gwynn, Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 95.

  47. 47.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §242, §246.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., §242.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    Mrs Humphry Ward, Eltham House (London: Cassell, 1915), p. 5.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., p. 94.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., pp. 77–78.

  53. 53.

    Mary wrote four war-time novels, Missing, The War and Elizabeth, Harvest and Cousin Philip. Harvest was the last novel published (posthumously).

  54. 54.

    Mrs Humphry Ward, Harvest (London: Collins, 1920), p. 122.

  55. 55.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §245.

  56. 56.

    Ward, Harvest, p. 124.

  57. 57.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 289.

  58. 58.

    C. E. Lawrence, “Review of Harvest,” The Bookman 58, no. 344 (1920), http://www.proquest.co.uk/.

  59. 59.

    Ibid.

  60. 60.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §242.

  61. 61.

    Prolegomena to Ethics, §353.

  62. 62.

    Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet.

  63. 63.

    For a discussion of how other women interpreted ‘doing good’, see Martin, “Gender, the City and the Politics of Schooling: Towards a Collective Biography of Women ‘Doing Good’ as Public Moralists in Victorian London.”

  64. 64.

    “Mrs Ward on a Problem of Divorce: In “Eltham House,” the Famous Case of Lord and Lady Holland Furnishes the Theme,” The New York Times, 1915.

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  1. Centre for History of Women’s Education, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

    Helen Loader

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Loader, H. (2019). Mary Ward: Fiction, Divorce and Inequality. In: Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14109-7_8

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