Mrs. Humphry Ward

ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 Of chief interest is the central, fifty-page summary of Beerbohm's emendations and miscellaneous jottings. What impressions can one glean from Beerbohm's reactions to Riewald's typescript? For one thing, Beerbohm seems to have been acutely conscious of, and protective of, his dignity. Riewald describes Beerbohm's Rapallo home, the Villino Chiaro, as having in its garden "A smaller villino, formerly a pig-stye"; Beerbohm deletes "pig-stye." Riewald describes Beerbohm as having "giggled prettily at everything Wilde and Lord Alfred said"; Beerbohm changes "giggled prettily" to "laughed consumedly." The effeminacy suggested by "giggled prettily" may have bothered Beerbohm, too, for there are changes that seem prompted by a reaction against any implications of homosexuality. Riewald's "He spoke onLytton Strachey, one of his old loves ... to whom he felt temperamentally related" becomes, at Beerbohm's suggestion, "He spoke on Lytton Strachey for whose work he had an unbounded admiration." Perhaps most interesting are the passages revealing Beerbohm's sensitivity about the question of his literary relationship to Oscar Wilde. He vehemently denies, for instance, that The Happy Hypocrite is a parody of Wilde, but Riewald convincingly demonstrates its close, somewhat parodie relationship to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Similarly, Beerbohm denies that Zuleika Dobson has close thematic and verbal links to some of Wilde's stories, but Riewald persuasively proves his own good critical judgment in having left the text of his book as it was, and in not having yielded to Beerbohm's suggestions and arguments. Martin Maner ______________________ Wright State University Mrs. Humphry Ward John Sutherland. Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.432 pp. $29.95 JOHN SUTHERLANLVS biography, Mrs. Humphry Ward, offers a vivid, often wry, presentation of Mary Augusta Ward's private and public lives, her activities on behalf of various reformist causes, and her stature as a figure at home and abroad. With its lively accounts of the novels' receptions, it restores to us a keen sense of her enormous popularity. By the early years of the Edwardian period, Ward had secured a literary reputation and popularity with bestsellers that included Robert Elsmere (1888), Marcella (1894), Heibeck ofBannisdale (1898), Eleanor (1900), and The Marriage of William Ashe (1905). She had achieved a certain 76 BOOK REVIEWS stature as a public figure with a list of notable accomplishments: first in Oxford, with her founding of Somerville Hall for Women (1879); and in London, establishing settlement houses (most notably, the Passmore Edwards Settlement), and play centers and vacation schools for poor and handicapped children; and, notoriously, with her leading role in the anti-suffrage campaign. Ward had passed, to borrow the subtitle of Sutherland's biography, from an eminent Victorian into a pre-eminent Edwardian. Yet by this point in time, the ridicule of "fat Mary" and all that poker-faced Victorian earnestness she represented was well underway, a "vilification" that would, as Sutherland details, reach "the level of a minor art form by 1918." And while the next generations' lampooning of Ward often hits the mark, no one who reads Sutherland's biography could help but feel that her vulnerable spots were but a small part of a far more complex and ultimately sympathetic personality. Despite my reservations about what the biography does not manage to achieve, reservations that do not diminish the value of that which it does achieve, anyone interested in or working on Ward will surely acknowledge an indebtedness for the material Sutherland has made available to us. Drawing extensively upon the letters and diaries of the Wards and the Arnolds, Sutherland has compiled a far more complete and fully documented biography than was previously available with Enid Huws Jones's 1973 biography, Mrs Humphry Ward. The amply indexed biography provides clear documentation, a judicious select bibliography, and a usefully detailed chronology of Ward's life. Without question, Sutherland's book represents an impressively and carefully researched enterprise. Furthermore, for both specialists and non-specialists interested in nineteenth-century Britain, particularly the period covered by ELT, the biography evokes a sense of time and place—of the social and intellectual life of Oxford in the 1870s, of...