Niece of Matthew Arnold, wife of Oxford Classics don and Times art critic Humphry Ward, counting Henry James and Leslie Stephen as friends, Mary Arnold Ward (1851–1920) was a mother of three, a pioneering education activist for women and poor and handicapped children, and England's bestselling novelist from 1890 to 1905. Born in Tasmania, Mary Arnold arrived in England in 1856 and encountered her family's distinguished connections among its intellectual aristocracy. As a child she weathered her father's Catholic conversion, reversion, and reconversion, in violation of a prenuptial promise; his wife marked one of these occasions by hurling a brick through a window. From 1867 Mary lived at Oxford, where she helped found Somerville College and began work on a history of Spain. On moving to London in 1885, she abandoned scholarship and in 1888 published Robert Elsmere, about a clergyman's crisis of faith at a moment when mystical and miraculous orthodoxies were yielding to a modernized Christian progressive social activism (thence “Elsmerism”). Its success catapulted “Mrs. Humphry Ward” to fame, wealth, and a long career that produced twenty-four more novels, an autobiography, and three books of war journalism, one commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt.
Despite Robert Elsmere's huge popular reception as a serious novel by an author heralded as George Eliot's successor, “the Great Mary” (as Henry James dubbed her) had severe critics from the start. Robert Elsmere “is ridiculous and antiquated,” Oscar Wilde remarked in “The Decay of Lying” (1891), what with “its unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the business of the old firm under a new name”; “It is simply Arnold's Literature and Dogma with the literature left out.” Agreeing that Ward practiced the novel as popular social polemic not art, Judith Wilt deftly positions her “behind her times” in a double sense: Ward's novels register Britain's slow transformation from a Victorian congeries of “multiple and mongrel religio-ethnic and national identities” into a tolerant, secular, singular national modernity, even as they follow after or even resist every breaking wave of change, from the Higher Criticism to suffrage (5).
Author of a book on Scott's novels and of Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of Maternal Choice, Wilt offers in Behind Her Times a rare and historically nuanced “long look” at Ward's “doomed and gallant fight to write within transition, always deferring the arrival of modernity—secular, socialist, feminist” (6, 8). In its very resistance to change, Wilt argues, Ward's fight is “true to something deep in her times” and (by way of the fraught relations between feminist analysis and fictional romance, “especially romantic religion”) ours (10). Charting Ward's trajectory through and “behind” her times, Wilt links her first novel, Miss Bretherton (1884), with her seventeenth, The Coryston Family (1913), as dramas of women's performance anxiety, in the theater and on the national stage. Wilt then analyzes “the rearview mirror of her Victorian formation” (15) in Robert Elsmere; the fantasy of rejuvenating an outworn political aristocracy in Marcella (1894) and Sir George Tressady (1895); the political fate of nineteenth-century Catholic “emancipations” in Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) and Eleanor (1900); the dark fable of suffragism's downfall in the “Victorian” (149) Delia Blanchflower (1915); and, in a fascinating final chapter, Ward's war novels (“Missing” [1917], Fields of Victory [1919], and The War and Elizabeth [1918]) and journalism (England's Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend [1916]) alongside war writing by Vera Brittain, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf.
Might posterity have been kinder had Ward died in 1900, as some propose? Wilt's illuminating book suggests the contrary, for her chapters on Ward's suffrage and war writings—two of the liveliest and most eye-opening—make perhaps the most compelling case for social and literary historians’ revived interest in this Victorian “Angel Out of the House” (Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, 3 vols. [New York, 1983], 1:xiv–xv). One may challenge Wilt's claims that modernist writers sacrificed politics to aesthetics or that Woolf considers fighting “a trait sex-linked only to males” rather than inculcated by education (168). Yet Wilt's wide-angle placement of Ward's adamantly antisuffragist and antimodernist Delia Blanchflower (the only novel to depict the suffragists’ militant wing) among H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica (1909), Elizabeth Robins's 1917 The Convert (based on her 1907 play Votes for Women), Maud Diver's The Awakening (1911), and Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) vividly evokes the complex dynamics of suffrage polemics within and outside these works. All, Wilt shows, stage “anxiety over the compatibility of new thought and old romance, of personal independence and the impersonal principle of the dependent human child”—and over abortion and birth control “as measured against the ‘slavery’ of women” (173). Similarly, Wilt's chapter on Ward's wartime fiction and journalism (by then her “money-generating fiction machine” had attenuated the distinction) redresses her omission from the canon of women's First World War writings (John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian [Oxford, 1990], 133). Ward's “narrative instinct,” Wilt argues, “asserts a receding goal, but the goal is of unusual interest, particularly today: a new Anglo-American nation with England still at its heart” (183).
Although Ward's biographer's judgment—“No writer has less of the non serviam in her make-up” (8)—stands firm, Wilt admirably succeeds in her aim of complicating it by tracing Ward's colloquy with her changing times. “At what point did she cease thinking?” Woolf wondered of her father's old friend; “Long Long ago I should say” (Diary, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. [New York, 1977–84], 1:300, 21 September 1919). For Woolf, Ward's “fatal compromise” with fame, wealth, social activism, and social prominence meant that “while her imagination always attempts to soar, it always agrees to perch. That is why we never wish to open them again” (“The Compromise” [1923], in Books and Portraits, ed. Mary Lyon [New York, 1977], 143). It is Judith Wilt's welcome achievement to have invited Victorianist and modernist social and literary historians to open Ward's books again, and to have charted many paths for exploring what we find there.
