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  • Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward
  • Gisela Argyle (bio)
Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward, by Judith Wilt; pp. 256. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005, $39.50, £27.50.

As the first critical monograph on Mary Arnold (Mrs. Humphry) Ward's novels, Judith Wilt's study completes the recovery of an author some of whose novels were seen as successors to those of George Eliot and paired with Thomas Hardy's in reviews. Belonging to the "new didacticism" of the 1880s and 1890s, her "grave" fiction, in William Gladstone's term, was read by those in public life as a corollary to the periodicals and disseminated radical ideas to a large public. This topicality soon made her fiction seem outdated, while her traditional narrative technique came to seem inferior and obsolete with the rise of modernist aesthetics. On her death, in 1920, The Times primarily commemorated not the novelist but her philanthropic achievements. The next generation, including Aldous Huxley, satirized her "schizoid" position as matriarch and woman of letters, scholar and best-selling novelist, promoter of higher education for women and opponent of female suffrage, philanthropist and war propagandist. They dismissed her as "Ma Hump."

An author's choice of name for Ward is as telling as it is with George Eliot. Mary Augusta Ward (née Arnold), granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and niece of Matthew Arnold, published her fiction (unlike her nonfiction) as Mrs. Humphry Ward, the name that John Sutherland also uses in the title of his definitive biography, subtitled Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian (1990). In contrast, Wilt, in her subtitle, alludes to Ward's anxiety as female "late-comer" to the Arnoldian heritage. Wilt makes this anxiety the subject of her first chapter, in which she discusses the heroine as performer, literally on stage as the young Juliet in Miss Bretherton (1884), Ward's first novel, and as the old "Lady Macbeth of the Drawing Room" in The Coryston Family (1913). These lesser but "most personal and self-revealing" novels portray the "curious dynamic of performance and bodily illness" (24), as modelled by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.

Wilt judges Ward as "deliberately, if poignantly, 'behind' her times, in both senses of the word," meeting modern developments of secularism, socialism, and feminism with both support and hesitancy (6). She argues that Ward's novels-of-ideas adopt the romance plot of property from the genre of historical fiction: "property as land, as the vote, work, knowledge, faith, power, as grail or carceral demon, as 'the future itself'" " is always at the center of her fictions" (4). Wilt discusses five major novels, with occasional references to others, foregrounding these properties as they relate to and connect modern developments. Wilt's analyses are richly informative and suggestive, benefiting from current critical methods and scholarship on genre and gender, relevant social history, and wide literary allusions.

In Ward's best-selling loss-of-faith novel Robert Elsmere (1888), Wilt sees the first "signs that Ward's deepest anxiety is to imagine the potential for modern national leadership in an Anglican England courting toleration but resisting secularism, in an English Christianity still seeking a middle way between Roman absolutism and Continental 'infidelity'" (50). Oscar Wilde quipped in "The Decay of Lying" (1891) that the novel was "simply Arnold's Literature and Dogma with literature left out." In other major novels Ward plays variations on the antagonists of this "middle way." Another best-seller, Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898), reverses the gender of the faithful and the skeptic and makes romance and tragedy of the heroine's temptation of self-abjection to Catholic rule in the name of love. While here Catholicism is the native religion of an English squire, whose superiors are [End Page 765] working for renewed power in England, in Eleanor (1900) it is the new republican threat to Catholicism in Italy that provides the text for the expatriate hero's book of prescription for secularized England. His advocacy of authoritarian religion for political use is questioned and changed through love by an "American girl" tutored in New England Puritanism...

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