Ward, MRS HUMPHRY.

Ward, MRS HUMPHRY. Mary Augusta Arnold was born in 1851 at Hobart in Tasmania, eldest daughter of Thomas Arnold (b. 1823), second son of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. Her father, becoming a Roman Catholic, resigned his place as inspector of schools, and returned to England in 1856 to become professor in the Roman Catholic university at Dublin. Afterwards in the Oratory School at Birmingham and at Oxford, he wrote a serviceable Manual of English Literature (1862), and edited Select English Works of Wyclif (3 vols. 1869), Beowulf (1876), and for the Rolls series Henry of Huntingdon (1879) and Symeon of Durham (1882-85). Together with the Rev. William E. Addis he edited the well-known Catholic Dictionary (1883). In 1872 Miss Arnold married Thomas Humphry Ward (b. 1845), the editor of The English Poets (4 vols. 1880-81), Men of the Reign (1885), Men of the Time (12th ed. 1887), and The Reign of Queen Victoria (1887). She began early to contribute to Macmillan's Magazine, and gave the fruits of her Spanish studies to Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography. A child's story, Milly and Olly (1881), Miss Bretherton (1884), a slight but promising novel, and the translation of Amiel's Journal Intime (1885) prepared the way for the widely read spiritual romance of Robert Elsmere (1888). The book was an attempt to represent the struggle of a soul in its voyage towards newer theistic aspirations after losing the landmarks of the old faith. Profound spiritual insight, broad human sympathy, and strong thinking are manifest throughout, but as a work of art it is marred by diffuseness, its didactic persistency of purpose, and a fatal want of mastery over the fundamental secret of the novelist—the power to make his puppets live rather than preach. Its successor, David Grieve (1892), showed all its faults but hardly all its merits, and yet is said to have brought its author in the first two months no less than £18,000. Later works, variously judged, were Marcella (1894), Bessie Costrell (1895), Sir George Tressady (1896), Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898—on the conflict of thought between a devout Catholic husband and an agnostic wife), and Eleanor (1900). Mrs Ward was a founder (1890) of University Hall, Gordon Square, as a centre of liberal religious thought.