Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Ward, Mary Augusta
WARD, MARY AUGUSTA (1851–1920), better known as Mrs. Humphry Ward, novelist and social worker, was the daughter of Thomas Arnold [q.v.], by his wife, Julia, daughter of William Sorell, of Hobart Town, Tasmania. Her father was the second son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby [q.v.]. She was born at Hobart Town 11 June 1851, and was the eldest of a family of eight children. At the time of her birth her father held an appointment as inspector of schools in the public education service of Tasmania, which he relinquished in 1856 on being received into the Church of Rome. He brought his family to England in the same year, and after a period of work in Roman Catholic educational establishments at Dublin and Birmingham, returned to the Church of England in 1865 and settled in Oxford. His daughter Mary, who had spent the interval at private boarding schools, came to live at home in the summer of 1867, and began, as she herself considered, her real education. She worked hard at music and early Spanish literature, and delighted in the stimulating society of the university. In 1872 she married Thomas Humphry Ward, fellow and tutor of Brasenose College, son of the Rev. Henry Ward, vicar of St. Barnabas, King Square, Holloway.
The movement for the higher education of women began in Oxford in the years succeeding Mary Ward's marriage, and in 1879 she acted as the first secretary of Somerville College. She was at that time engaged on an ambitious piece of historical work, the writing of the lives of early Spanish ecclesiastics for the Dictionary of Christian Biography. In 1881 her environment was changed by removal to London, but her literary activities were not interrupted. Mr. Humphry Ward had joined the staff of The Times, and his wife also became a contributor to that paper as well as to various reviews. In spite of writer's cramp, which now first attacked her and continued to hamper her for the rest of her life, she wrote her first novel, Miss Bretherton, in 1884, and translated Henri Frederic Amiel's Journal Intime in the same year.
Mrs. Ward had an hereditary interest in religious problems, which had been fostered by her life in Oxford. While still a young woman she arrived at the conclusion that Christianity could be revitalized by discarding its miraculous element and emphasizing its social mission, and to this she held firmly all her life. She embodied her views in her best-known novel, Robert Elsmere (1888), which at once excited public interest, and was the subject of elaborate comment by Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century. The sales of the first three editions in the United Kingdom amounted to 70,500, and pirated editions of the book had a great success in America.
Robert Elsmere brought its author into touch with many who desired, as she did, to work among the London poor, as missionaries of undogmatic religion. In 1890 she and her associates founded a settlement at University Hall, Gordon Square, for popular Bible-teaching and ‘simplified’ Christianity on the one hand, and for social purposes on the other. This developed a few years later into the Passmore Edwards Settlement, opened in Tavistock Square in 1897 [see Edwards, John Passmore.]
Though her health was always uncertain, Mrs. Ward continued for the rest of her life to accomplish an enormous amount of work. Her novels followed each other in rapid succession. The History of David Grieve appeared in 1892, Marcella in 1894, The Story of Bessie Costrell in 1895, Sir George Tressady in 1896, Helbeck of Bannisdale in 1898, Eleanor in 1900, Lady Rose's Daughter in 1903, The Marriage of William Ashe in 1905, Fenwick's Career in 1906, and The Testing of Diana Mallory in 1908. She continued to publish novels down to 1920, but except for The Case of Richard Meynell (1911), a return to the theme of Robert Elsmere, her later books did not achieve that remarkable combination of serious intellectual interest with descriptive power and skilful presentation of social types which had won her her great reputation.
Mrs. Ward's practical achievements were no less notable than her literary success. At the Passmore Edwards Settlement she instituted the ‘children's play hours’, which developed into the movement, so closely associated with her name, for recreational centres for London children. In 1898 she set on foot a scheme for the education, at the Settlement, of crippled children; and by many years of experiment and propaganda she succeeded in so fully awakening the public mind to the necessity for special educational facilities for physically defective children, that the provision of such facilities was made compulsory on local authorities in 1918.
Mrs. Ward's other principal activity, in the period before the European War, was the organization of opposition to the extension of the franchise to women. She was the foundress of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League (1908), and also, since she combined anti-suffrage feeling with a personal taste for political activity, of the ‘Joint Advisory Council of Members of Parliament and Women Social Workers’, an organization for bringing the views of women to bear on the legislature without the aid of the vote. In 1910 she wrote a series of political pamphlets, Letters to My Neighbours, for the benefit of the Hertfordshire constituency in which her son was conservative candidate.
During the War Mrs. Ward undertook, at the request of Mr. Roosevelt and with the encouragement of the British government, a series of articles designed to bring home to the imagination of the American people the efforts and achievements of the Allies. She was allowed facilities for seeing the army in the field, the navy, and the munitions works, and she published the result of her tours of inspection in the press as Letters to an American Friend, later republished as England's Effort (1916), Towards the Goal (1917), and Fields of Victory (1919). In 1918 she published an autobiographical volume, A Writer's Recollections.
Shortly before her death Mrs. Ward was invited to act as one of the first seven women magistrates, and the university of Edinburgh offered her the degree of LL.D. She died in London 24 March 1920, and was buried at Aldbury, Hertfordshire. Her husband died in 1926. She had one son and two daughters: Arnold, who was member of parliament for West Hertfordshire from 1910 to 1918; Dorothy; and Janet, the wife of Professor George Macaulay Trevelyan.
[The Times, 25 March 1920; Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward, 1923; Mrs. Humphry Ward, A Writer's Recollections, 1918.]