The Works of Mrs. Humphry Ward

Ward followed its success with more than 20 other novels, notably David Grieve , Sir George Tressady , and Helbeck of Bannisdale By the turn of the century she had become firmly established as a best-selling author. In she founded the Anti-Suffrage League. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.

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Mrs. Humphry Ward

Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Christian Socialism , movement of the midth century that attempted to apply the social principles of Christianity to modern industrial life. The term was generally associated with the demands of Christian activists for a social program of political and economic action on behalf of all individuals, impoverished or wealthy, and the…. Woman suffrage , the right of women by law to vote in national and local elections.

Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian.

Mary Augusta Ward

Thomas Arnold and his Family. The North American Review. Australian Dictionary of Biography. Retrieved 1 March An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire. Retrieved 26 August Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere.

Mary Augusta Ward - Wikipedia

Essays on Modern Novelists. The American Catholic Quarterly Review. Victorian Faith in Crisis: Humphry Ward's Anti-Suffrage Campaign: From Polemics to Art". The Women's Victory - and After: The London Gazette Supplement. Memories of Victorian London. Echoes of the 'eighties: Oscar Wilde In America:: Humphry Mary Augusta ".

Shelburne Essays, 11th series. A Reply to Lady Lovat and Mrs. The Nineteenth Century and After. Beetz, Kirk H Humphry Ward A Bibliography". Bellringer, Alan W Mary Ward, the Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne.

• Une année studieuse (Folio) (French Edition).
• A Tuscan Dining Experience;
• Amish Knit Lit Circle: Smicksburg Tales 3.
• Gluten Free Recipes with Almond.

Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition. University of Massachusetts Press, pp. Between East and West. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge University Press, pp. The Feminine Note in Fiction. Humphry Ward and Thomas Hardy. The Development of the English Novel. Although in effect, a traditional Unitarian in her beliefs, Mrs Ward never joined the denomination and indeed had a somewhat negative, or at least ambivalent, attitude towards it.

For a time, until its closure in , she attended the credally unitarian but Anglican-style services of the former Anglican minister Stopford Brooke at Bedford Chapel.

In Mrs Ward stirred up controversy with Unitarians when she wrote to the Manchester Guardian criticizing the services at Manchester College, Oxford as barren relics of old Puritanism. However, she gave a number of lectures at Unitarian-sponsored events: She strove to be controversial, especially in her religious lectures. Of her audiences she said, "I want to poke them up. In her opinion, the position of Unitarianism as a denomination in Britain was discouraging. Although it was closer 'in point of cultivation and learning' to the established church than any other dissenting denomination, it had not become part of the fabric of national life.

Unitarianism still suffered, she thought, from a puritanical 'jealousy of beautiful forms, a defective sense for what is delicate and lovely' which was repellent to the cultured.

Moreover, she thought Unitarians too isolated and in danger of falling behind the advance of modern thought. Unitarians needed to shed the impression of being 'the remains of something else' and boldly and enthusiastically proclaim a fresh, modern message. She thought the Unitarian task was to teach a new kind of Christianity: Jesus as a historically real prophet, without supernatural powers, and the inspiration for improvement in the condition of human life.

Mrs Ward's ambivalent attitude to Unitarianism reflected her uncle Matthew's dislike of sects-he called them 'hole-and-corner religion'. Her increasing concern was rather that the Church of England should open itself to all who could be called Christians, unitarians included. In the words of her daughter, Janet Penrose Trevelyan, she had a '"hunger" for admission to the [National] Church though always on her own terms! She wished to be able to take communion without having to subscribe to catechisms and creeds. She became quite bitter that the Church of England would not admit those with unitarian beliefs.

Her great hope-not unlike that of James Martineau-was that the Church of England would develop into a truly national church, with every shade of Christian opinion from the most traditionally orthodox to the most radically unitarian worshipping together. Mrs Ward promoted her idea of a broader-than-broad-church fictionally in The Case of Richard Meynell , When an Anglican clergyman propounds liberal Christian views from the pulpit, he is tried for heresy. The novel concludes with the prayer that one day there will be room for such liberal Christians in the Anglican fold.

The novel is something of a sequel to Robert Elsmere. Elsmere appears as a ghost hallucinated by his widow, advising her to be more tolerant of the heretic Richard Meynell, who eventually marries the Elsmeres' daughter. Less in tune with its time, it enjoyed nothing of the success of its forerunner. Mrs Ward's involvement in public affairs was intense and varied.

In she had played a key part in the founding of Somerville Hall later College , the non-denominational of the two first Oxford colleges for women. She was on the Somerville Council, In she was invited to be the first woman examiner of men at Oxford. Some ten years after publishing Robert Elsmere , Mrs Ward brought the social concerns of her fictitious hero to bear on real life. In her creation, the Passmore Edwards Settlement named for the 'rags to riches' philanthropist she persuaded to finance it in Tavistock Place, London, opened as a 'settlement' and an educational club for working class men and women.

Later it included an innovative 'play centre' for children, the forerunner of after-school care in Britain, and soon also a special school for handicapped children from working class homes who previously had stayed listlessly at home while their parents were out to work.

Though loved by the children when she appeared, Mrs Ward's role was primarily that of organizer and fund-raiser. She was highly effective in persuading rich philanthropists, such as Passmore Edwards himself, to pay for it. These privately-founded schools, which became government-funded during World War I, started the play school movement, and opened a new era in the treatment of the handicapped.

Administrative / Biographical History

Mrs Ward used her influence to insert a clause in the Education Bill, obliging Local Education Authorities to fund children's play centres, vocational schools, and other recreational facilities for children, and to add a clause on behalf of physically handicapped children to the Education Act of In she urged that the recently founded Save the Children Fund should not deny assistance to German children.

Her influence on child-care and care for the handicapped gives her a significant place in social history. Although the promotion of higher education for women was one of her great concerns, late in life, as president of the Anti-Suffrage League in , she campaigned against votes for women. This surprised many who knew her as one of the most intellectually brilliant and socially-active women of her time.

She felt that women influenced politics best by influencing their men-she wrote some of her son's speeches during his brief period as a Member of Parliament. She thought that, as women were not subject to military service, they should not be in a position to launch wars and, as women lacked experience in business, they ought not to make large scale economic decisions.

She could not bear to part with the model of indirect feminine influence she had developed in her life and her novels.