Woman of the Century/May Alden Ward

WARD, Mrs. May Alden, author, burn in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, 1st March, 1853. She is in the sixth generation from John and Pnscilla Alden. As a school-girl her favorite studies were literature and the languages. MAY ALDEN WARD. At the age of nineteen she was graduated from the Ohio Wesleyan University, and one year later, in 1873, she became the wife of Rev. William G. Ward. Numerous translations and newspaper and magazine articles gave early evidence of Mrs. Ward's versatility. Her special liking for studies in Italian. French and German literature was strengthened by two years of travel in Europe, and in 1887 she published a comprehensive and attractive life of Dante, which at once won for her high rank as a thorough scholar and discriminating and graphic biographer. She issued in 1891 a life of Petrarch, no less fascinating than its predecessor. She has achieved popularity as a parlor lecturer. Her series of lectures on French and German literature was one of the most entertaining literary features of the season before her departure from her home in Cleveland, Ohio. A volume of essays on those subjects is to be issued, and a course of lectures on the early life and literature of New England is of yet more recent preparation. During her residence in Cleveland, she was a member of the Ohio Woman's Press Association, and was made president of the East End Conversational Club. Her home is now in Franklin, Mass., where she is in touch with many of the literary circles of the East, while prosecuting her chosen work.