John Sutherland's 'Mrs Humphry Ward' 1990

 

Clarendon Press, Oxford first edition - 1990

Having read three of Mrs Humphry Ward's books -  Robert Elsmere (1888), Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) and The Case of Richard Meynell (1911) - this year, I wanted to find more about her. John Sutherland I knew from his excellent The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1988), so I plumped for his biography, rather than Ward's granddaughter's (Janet Trevelyan).

Quite apart from Sutherland's detailed chronology and comment on her books, two aspects of Mary Ward's life stood out for me - both deleterious. He gives a whole Chapter (17) to 'Health 1890-1900'.  In fact, Mary appears to have been 'ill' on and off throughout her life; as Sutherland says, one could write her biography as a sixty-nine year medical case report or an anthology of the age's female invalidisms. Over the years she was racked by a baffling array of chronic, acute, subacute, psychosomatic, and organic ailments. Few pages go by without comment on another medical problem. As a baby and girl she appears to have been predisposed to persistent lowering complaints of two types - colds and rheumatism. She was, as her father told her grandmother a very sickly child - with perpetual colds, hacking coughs and dire teething problems.  Infection-prone, Mary suffered throughout her life from 'septic' throats, from inflamed or 'lumpy' tonsils, and earache. On the evidence of her daughter's diaries, her mother regularly caught at least a dozen colds or 'flu infections annually. In the early 1880s Mary began to experience 'writer's cramp'; it continued throughout her life being particularly acute during the most stressful  phase of her novel writing. Bad teeth plagued her throughout her life (5 were pulled out under gas in 1905-6). Insomnia led to use or abuse with sleeping draughts. She regularly used chlorodyne, trional and morphia. The most intractable and puzzling illness was what she termed 'side' or 'the old enemy'. it was eventually thought to be gallstones. In later life she suffered from excruciating eczema - a mass of white blisters would scavenge her arms; styes and boils added to her problems. From 1906 onwards she was never a well woman again.                                                     

Mary Ward in the early 1990s

The other deleterious aspect was her 'men'. Her father, Tom Arnold (Dr Arnold of Rugby's second son) would these days be accused of cruelty to his eldest daughter Mary. Up until her mid teens she rarely saw him, being shoved off to various schools while her siblings mainly enjoyed the comforts of a home life. He vacillated between Anglicanism and Catholicism (Newman was there to tempt him) and comes across as a thoroughly selfish man. If he was second rate, then Mary's husband Thomas Humphry Ward (1845-1926) was third rate, spending his life working for The Times as their Art critic, whilst dabbling in purchases of Old Masters (more often than not being bamboozled or bamboozling himself). For much of their marriage, and increasingly so, he sponged off his wife's earnings. There was worse to come: Mary's only son, Arnold Sandwith Ward (1876-1950) was a fourth-rater. An inveterate gambler, often worse for drink, every position or job (the Army, the House of Commons) his mother's influence gained for him was to prove disastrous. In the end, her husband's spendthrift ways and her son's gambling, meant Mary Ward had to keep churning out books to pay for them. No wonder, Arnold's cousins, the Huxleys, and his younger sister Janet (who married G.M. Trevelyan) came to dislike him intensely. There are few heroes or heroines. The ones that stick out are Mary's eldest child, Dorothy (1874-1964), who never married and who spent her life supporting her mother and trying to minimise the malodorous effect of her brother; George Smith and his son-in-law Reginald Smith, of the publishing house Smith, Elder were not only to be her publishers but her benefactors and saviours on many occasions. Not only did the benefit from her successes but they kept faith with her during the remorseless decline in standards (and sales) from the 1900s onwards.

The tragedy of Mary Ward's career (and she is not alone as an author in this) is that she fell out of fashion. The American book-buying public made her name (from Robert Elsmere onwards for some dozen years), but they lost interest in her type of novel as the 20th century dawned. From 1900, she wrote some good novels, and some good characters and descriptions in the not-so-good works. But one gets the feeling that they had to be written to keep the creditors at bay - the town house and Stocks, the country mansion, the incessant needs of husband and son, were only dealt with by her churning out book after book. She was briefly a useful propogandist during the Great War (egged on by the ex-USA President Roosevelt and others), but her general work was long past its sell-by date.

Mary Ward's work in supporting or setting up University Hall, Marchmont Hall and then the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Tavistock Square certainly deserved more than a measly CBE. THE PES proved a boon not only for the Working Class and children with the Vacation schools, but also for hundreds of handicapped children, as 'special' schools were developed round London. The debit side is filled with Mary Ward's major involvement in the Anti-Suffrage League. She launched the Anti-Suffrage Review in December 1908, led an anti-suffrage deputation to the Prime Minister Asquith in June 1910, and ensured her son championed the cause once he was elected to Parliament. It is a strange course as her own life and activities (surrounded by second-rate men) surely should have suggested that women were at least men's equal.

Virginia Woolf made a typically shrewish remark in her diary, on hearing of Mary Ward's death: Mrs Ward is dead; poor Mrs Humphrey Ward; and it appears that she was merely a woman of straw after all - shovelled into the grave and already forgotten. Unfeeling, but with more than a grain of truth in it. I like to think it is also true of Virginia Woolf.

I will probably look out for three more of Mary Ward's books - Marcella (1894), Lady Connie (1916), and her memoir A Writer's Recollections (1918). However, I have large pile of books on my Study floor looking at me accusingly. Their needs will be attended to first.