Mrs. Humphry Ward's Fictional Experiments in the Woman Question

Current evaluations of Mrs. Humphry Ward as novelist range from "Victorian anti-feminist" to "New Woman novelist" and "rebel." For a more nuanced treatment of Ward, which would justify her initial reception as an important serious novelist who engaged her readers in imaginative experiments on important social and moral questions, this essay examines five novels as a series, in accordance with Hans Robert Jauss's methodological precept in his seminal essay, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." According to Jauss, such a literary series implies "a dialogical and at once processlike relationship between work, audience, and new work."