Mrs Humphry Ward

INTRODUCTION

Mrs Humphry Ward, like other writers who were extremely popular during their own time periods, demonstrates more extravagantly than most Victorian novelists the vicissitudes of literary reputation. At the peak of her career, her most famous novel Robert Elsmere sold nearly a quarter of a million copies within a few months of its publication in February 1888, and was soon translated into most foreign languages. One hundred years later only three of her books are in print: Robert Elsmere, Helbeck of Bannisdale, and Marcella. This recent re-issue of some of her titles bodes well, however, for a renewed interest in her artistry and importance as a social and intellectual commentator on the late Victorian and turn-of-the-century scene.

Responses to Mrs Humphry Ward and her works have always been interesting and sometimes provocative. As early as 1915, we find a collection of wisdom gleaned from her various novels–Sayings of Mrs Humphry Ward. A counter-collection of critical responses could be assembled and entitled Sayings about Mrs Humphry Ward. Some of the more memorable passages that could be included are:

We found, in a copy of The Times we had brought with us, a letter from Mrs Humphry Ward, denouncing the moral tone of the younger generation, a propos of a rising young writer and having read it aloud we decided to do something about it. So we stripped ourselves under the trees as though there was no one in the world but ourselves, and we made love all over Mrs Humphry Ward . . . [H. G. Wells, H. G. Wells in Love]

I have invented a destiny for Mrs Humphry Ward’s heroines. It is terrible, and just. They ought to be caught . . . in the siege of a great city by a foreign army. . . [and left unprotected] from a brutal and licentious soldiery. . . . I admit that this invention of mine is odious, and quite un-English, and such as would never occur to a right-minded subscriber to Mudie’s. But it illustrates the mood caused in me by witnessing the antics of those harrowing dolls. [Arnold Bennett, Books and Persons]

She thinks meanly of humanity. She is an aristocrat–not a vulgar aristocrat, but an intellectual aristocrat, one whose ideal is of a small governing class of exquisite souls who would behave nicely to the poor, make just laws for them, and generally keep them in their proper station with a firm but gentle hand. In a word, she is against democracy. . . . She is too remote from humanity. She needs a little of the alloy of our common clay. A visit to the polling booth with her humble neighbour would do her a world of good. [Alfred George Gardiner, Pillars of Society]

For a female figure in Victorian England, the events of Mrs Humphry Ward’s life are exceptional and multi-faceted. The list of her relations is impressive in its own right. She was a granddaughter of Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby. Her father was the younger Thomas Arnold and Matthew Arnold was her uncle. William Edward Forster, also her uncle, presented the landmark Education Bill in 1870. In 1885 her sister, Julia Arnold, married Leonard Huxley, son of the controversial scientist and educator, T. H. Huxley. After her sister’s death in 1908, she devoted care and attention to her famous nephews Julian and Aldous Huxley. Her friends and acquaintances included Henry James, W. E. Gladstone, Lewis Carroll, Leslie Stephen, Beatrice Webb, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Mary Augusta Arnold was born in Hobart, Tasmania on 11 June 1851. In 1856 she returned with her family to England. At the age of twenty she married Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. From 1872 until her death in 1920, she chose to be known as Mrs Humphry Ward. In 1881 the Wards moved to London. Her writing career spanned over forty years and included 25 novels, a half-dozen nonfictional works, a two-volume autobiography, and numerous essays and introductions. Besides her writing endeavours, she created and worked tirelessly with the Passmore Edwards Settlement in London. She actively promoted the causes of women’s education at Oxford and the University Extension system in Victorian England. In the early years of the twentieth century, she was active in the anti-suffragette movement. During World War I she visited the battlefields in France and wrote three book-length reports on the catastrophic conflict.

Mrs Humphry Ward’s reputation was established with the appearance in 1888 of her third book–and first full-length novel–Robert Elsmere. Her first published piece of long fiction had been a children’s story, Milly and Oily, in 1881, which received a few favourable reviews but sold slowly–about 2,000 copies in its first seven years. Miss Bretherton, a short novel, appeared three years later, to a mixed critical reception. Concerning the artistic development of an actress, and involving along the way a good deal of dramatic and critical theory, the novel was praised for its intelligence but criticized for a lack of passion and a dry, theoretical air. Miss Bretherton lost money–22 pounds–for Macmillan, its publisher. Robert Elsmere, by contrast, attracted reviews by the score, including a crucial 23 pages by W. E. Gladstone in Nineteenth Century, and sold upwards of 30,000 copies in England and an estimated 200,000 (mostly pirated) copies in America, within one year of publication.

In part, the success of Robert Elsmere was due to its topicality. Its hero is a clergyman who renounces his position and orthodox faith when confronted by historical and scientific criticism of the Bible, and who works instead for the establishment of a substitute church, called the “New Brotherhood of Christ,” intended to spread the spirit of the Gospels to the common man. Elsmere’s loss of faith parallels numerous real-life cases in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the book’s raising of a diversity of religious questions reflects two distinct areas of conflict Mrs Ward was exposed to as a child, and as the wife of an Oxford don. In the late 1850s and 1860s she had experienced at first hand the threat to Protestantism of Tract arianism and Catholicism when her father converted to Catholicism after five years of marriage to a wife who remained devoutly Protestant. Later, at Oxford, she became actively involved in the threat to Protestantism from the other side, from liberals who, like Elsmere, espoused reinterpretation of the Bible in the light of new scientific and historical developments.

Though Gladstone and some other contemporary critics argued otherwise, Mrs Ward refuses to simplify or falsify most of the complex and controversial issues in her novel. Yet Robert Elsmere remains valuable as more than a historical record of the nineteenth-century’s religious upheavals. Today, as In 1888, it is a great work of literature because It applies Its author’s educated and discriminating critical intelligence to an ambitious range of social and philosophical Issues, dealing with them confidently and uncompromisingly. It compares to George Eliot’s Middlemarch in its careful documentation of a cross-section of social life, and In Its constructive concern for the physical and spiritual welfare of the poor. But to a greater extent than Middlemarch, Robert Elsmere is enriched by an abundance of literary and cultural references–indeed, the cultural density of Mrs Ward’s novel parallels the art, architecture, and library of Squire Wendover’s mansion, which Elsmere delights In so much, and which is the catalyst to his crisis of faith. The first half of the novel is saturated also with fine delineation and appreciation of the English countryside Westmoreland and Surrey–and the second half with a sense of the modern city, “the great new-made London … the London of the democracy of the nineteenth century, and of the future.”¹ Throughout, the novel manifests a highly developed sense of place and a strong awareness of its symbolic and thematic significance in a scene. On the psychological level, Mrs Ward shows at times something approaching a Jamesian discrimination and subtlety in developing her central love relationship, and the individual consciousness of her hero, Robert Elsmere, and heroine, Catherine Elsmere.

Mrs Ward went on to write only one other work of comparable stature–another religious novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale, published in 1898. Laura Fountain, the heroine, attempts to move in the opposite direction to Elsmere, from atheism to Catholic faith, when she falls in love with Alan Helbeck, the head of an old Catholic family in the north of England. Like Robert Elsmere, the novel springs from the personal religious experiences of its author–this time, the Catholic-Protestant clash enacted in her own family throughout her childhood. When Mrs Ward’s father, Tom Arnold, converted to Catholicism after five years of marriage to a devout Protestant, his wife threatened separation, and on the day in 1856 when he was formally received into the Catholic Church in Hobart, Tasmania, she threw a brick through one of the church windows. From then on Mary grew up loving her father but feeling also her mother’s hatred of all things Catholic. In 1865 Tom Arnold renounced Catholicism and became again committed to the Anglican Church. The new attachment was tenuous, however, lasting eleven years before he rejoined the Catholics, and Mary, now Mrs Ward, was placed in the position of trying, unsuccessfully, to reconcile her parents, who lived apart until her mother died in 1888. Thus, where Robert Elsmere attempts to reconcile and compromise religious differences, Helbeck of Bannisdale reflects personal witness of the incompatibility of individuals with spiritual differences.

Part of Mrs Ward’s success in dealing with sensitive religious issues in Robert Elsmere is her fairness to all sides of each controversy. She humanizes the central conflict by identifying the two sides with her hero and heroine, and though she explicitly supports Elsmere in his modernization of Christianity, Catherine is just as much an embodiment of the book’s moral centre. Though the central couple are in conflict, they are equally hero and heroine. In Helbeck of Bannisdale, however, the balance is not so easily maintained. When she began writing, Mrs Ward’s intention was to be fair to the Catholic viewpoint. As she wrote her father in 1896:

Would you mind my dearest, if I chose a certain Catholic background for my next story? I won’t do it if you dislike it, but though of course my point of view is anything but Catholic, I should certainly do what I had thought of doing, with sympathy, & probably in such a way as to make the big English public understand more of Catholicism than they do now.²

After she finished the novel she apparently felt that she had been fair to both sides. “I have written it with my heart,” she again wrote her father. “I have alternately felt with Helbeck & with Laura, and have loved them both.³ These “alternate” feelings show through in the novel when Helbeck has the sympathy in the first half and Laura in the second. In the beginning the strong, dignified, and almost aristocratic Helbeck is contrasted to Laura’s Protestant cousins, the spiteful, prejudiced, and fiercely anti-Catholic Masons. But later, when Laura finds she is engaged not only to Helbeck, but to an intolerant Catholic system that resents her intrusion and will not respect her personal beliefs, her arguments against religious dogma become overwhelmingly effective. To some extent Helbeck himself survives her attacks because of his great personal dignity and the intensity of his love. But the Catholic machine he serves thereby bears fuller responsibility for Laura’s dilemma, and finally for her suicide.

Helbeck of Bannisdale is a remarkable work of literature, however. It is also the outstanding product of her pruoccupation with the lives and works of the Brontë sisters. (Immediately after finishing Helbeck she produced a series ol critical introductions for the seven-volume Haworth edition of the Brontë novels.) The central conflict resembles that of Villette, while its rural setting and country house recall Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. It is Brontëesque also in the intensity and final tragedy of the passions involved in its love story. Mrs Ward’s realization ol English landscape is as Wordsworthian as ever, and the story is punctuated by a series of vivid and memorable short scones–for example, the early piano scene between Laura and Hubert Mason, the scene in the steel works where a worker falls into a furnace, or Laura’s night wandering and sleeping in the quarry.

Mrs Ward published four other novels in the 1890s, only one of which — The History of David Grieve ( 1892)–emphasizess religious themes so much. The hero of this novel is a member of the bourgeoisie, but has religious views very similar to Elsmere’s, The other novels are more social and political. The best of them, Marcella (1894), tries, like Disraeli’s Sybil half a century before, to reconcile a socialist heroine with her upper-class lover. Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima Is another clear influence. Though sales of these novels never approached those of Robert Elsmere, Mrs Ward retained a solid readership through the close of the century, and hor novels were often well received critically.

III

If we examine the second phase of Mrs Ward’s career–books written between 1900 and 1920–two issues are of central concern. The first question to be addressed is the extent of the decline in her physical state and in her literary reputation. The second consideration is the incidents of violence both in the real world and in her fictional works. These two issues are interesting, complex, and worthy of fuller discussion.

Recent biographers such as Enid Huws Jones and Esther M. G. Smith have described in some detail the physical ailments that beset Mrs Ward in her later years. In 1890 she first suffered some “internal pain and nervous crippling of her right leg.”⁴ She found it difficult to write for long periods of time. In the mid-1890s she was caught up in a whirlwind of exhausting activities and new popular pressures of the literary marketplace. For example, she devoted many hours in 1893 to the planning of the Passmore Edwards Settlement: she wrote letters and gave lectures to secure funds for the project. The forms of literary publication were also changing at this time. It was the waning days of the monopolizing control of such large circulating libraries as Mudie’s with their dedication to the traditional three-volume Victorian novel. In fact, Marcella (1894) was the last of Mrs Ward’s fictional works to appear in the three-volume format. Sir George Tressady (1896) was the first of her serialized novels and it made its debut in Century Magazine. After arduous proofreading, trips to Italy were needed for rest and recuperation.

In some respects writing and production pressures were relieved by secretarial assistance and new technology. In 1896 Bessie Churcher became her secretary and Delia Blanchflower (1914) was the first of Mrs Ward’s novels to be sent to the publisher in typescript. She wrote unceasingly during these years: books appeared at one- or two-year intervals. Some titles offended certain readers because of Mrs Ward’s controversial social and political stances. For example, Daphne or Marriage à la Mode (1909) is “a bitter attack on the American divorce laws seen as an offense against the Anglican church.⁵ Delia Blanchflower is an anti-suffrage novel and Mrs Ward’s political activities during the period just prior to World War I caused her to lose some friends. Another strain on Mrs Ward during the war years that has recently come to light was the need to write compulsively in order to secure funds to pay off the gambling debts recklessly accumulated by her only son, Arnold, while on duty as a Times correspondent in the war theatres of Egypt, Sudan, and India. Smith points out that “The villagers about Stocks and perceptive friends sensed that some of Mrs Ward’s late writing was done not only to offset the deprivations of war but to pay ‘Arnie’s’ debts. Certainly some of her late writing is uninspired, although occasionally she catches the tones of hope and fear that echoed through those war-torn years.”⁶

Between the years 1889 and 1918 Mrs Ward devoted much energy to opposing the national enfranchisement of women. She produced two types of writing: polemical articles in a variety of journals and several novels written in late career which devote more extended treatment to the issue. Her journal articles against women’s suffrage fall into three divisions: the initial protest of 1889; the devoted and extended activity between 1908-1914; and the desperate final response in 1917-1918.

In the June 1889 polemic in The Nineteenth Century, “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” Mrs Ward opposes parliamentary suffrage for women for five fundamental reasons: 1) that men and women work in different spheres of activity and contribute different responsibilities to the State; 2) that the effect of the vote on women’s moral character and on family life would be devastating; 3) that the extension of suffrage to women would cause some “grave practical difficulties”; 4) that political change and social reform must proceed very deliberately and gradually; and 5) that there is no certain guarantee that votes for women will remedy “certain injustices of the law towards women” or attend to the “many wants, especially among working women, which are now neglected.”⁷

From 1906 to 1914 there was strident debate concerning women’s suffrage. In early 1906, the political atmosphere created by the accession to power of the Liberal Government again brought the issue to the forefront of the nation’s attention. The Suffragettes used more visible public tactics to press their cause: they interrupted speeches of public officials and sometimes provoked dramatic confrontations which led to violence. By 1908 Mrs Ward felt compelled to take her journalistic pen in hand to address the issues and to become involved publicly in organizational efforts. The Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was established on 21 July 1908; Mrs Ward was elected as its first president. She delivered numerous speeches, some in industrial towns such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield. Many of these speeches she re-worked into polemical pieces. In one of these articles she lists recent “lawless” acts of disruption perpetrated by the increasingly militant suffragettes: attacks upon politicians’ houses, street marches, and explosive rallies.

Mrs Ward’s intensified interest in the growing militancy of the suffrage movement between 1905 and 1914 culminated in the writing of the novel Delia Blanchflower, first published in 1914.⁸ Although it is surely the most extensive treatment in fiction of the ideas and actions of the suffragette movement, it has largely been ignored or ridiculed because it was written by a woman writer of the anti-suffrage persuasion. Recent book-length studies of Mrs Ward generally offer only dismissive comments. For example, in a harsh, two-sentence capsule review, Enid Huws Jones calls Delia “a crude piece about the burning of a fine old mansion by suffragettes: an abject trio of a persecuted country girl, a virginal schoolteacher and a silly dressmaker, led by a sinister governess. Rescued from her evil genius, Delia marries a forty-two year old bachelor, magistrate, county councillor, cricketer and motor-car driver.”⁹ Vineta Colby in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century devotes an entire chapter to Mrs Ward, but only one paragraph to Delia.¹⁰ Similarly, William S. Peterson offers a brief paragraph on Delia and he later complains that her use of suffragettes and flappers in her fiction written after 1910 “is a sign of Mrs. Ward’s progressive deterioration as a novelist . . .¹¹

Before Delia Blanchflower, Mrs Ward made several initial fictional attempts to portray women involved in the suffrage debate. Thus, in The Testing of Diana Mallory (1908), Daphne (1909), and The Coryston Family (1913) she briefly presents negative stereotypes of militant suffragettes: that is, cold, one-dimensional, hysterical “shrieking sisters.” What makes Delia such a singular achievement is that she devotes an entire novel to the issue and that she moves beyond stereotypical, one-dimensional presentations of women who support the opposite cause. Mrs Ward’s Delia focuses primarily on the pro-suffrage movement. She must, therefore, create complex characters (beyond stereotypes) and display the full range of motives for those figures who work both for and against the movement. Through an interesting range of characters (both male and female) in the novel, then, Mrs Ward presents the spectrum of political opinions regarding women and the vote. The novel is certainly not a collection of wooden voices.

In Delia Mrs Ward presents a range of emotional, social, political, and economic motives. She also offers an extensive and complex treatment of the often violent suffrage agitation that occurred between 1912 and 1914. Although the leader of the suffragettes, Gertrude Marvell, is ultimately consumed in the flames of arson that she has perpetrated, she is allowed to present her social protest convincingly: “She burnt again with the old bitter sense of injustice, on the economic side; remembering fiercely her own stinted earnings, and the higher wages and larger opportunities of men, whom, intellectually, she despised.”¹² Here Mrs Ward again demonstrates her awareness of the need for women’s independence and the expansion of opportunities–intellectual and economic–for women.

Esther M. G, Smith is correct in pointing out Mrs Ward’s “later sympathy for the growing freedoms of women”; indeed, there is a pattern in the later novels by which she expresses “her sympathetic interest in the expanding role of women.”¹³ Another element to this experience, however, is the increased contact of women with violence, frustration, and disappointment. Beginning with Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898), Mrs Ward’s heroines are often the victims, perpetrators, or observers of life-destroying violence. The tragic heroine of Helbeck, Laura Fountain, struggles with a religious conversion that threatens her individual identity and ultimately she takes her own life. The central episode in Marcella is a case involving the conviction and execution of a poacher who murdered a gamekeeper. The young heroine in The Coryston Family also experiences growth and reaction when she learns of “a spectacle of horror”–the suicide of the Bates family with whom she has been conducting social work in the neighbourhood: “Marcia sat there hour after hour, now lost in her own grief, now in that of others; realizing through pain, through agonized sympathy, the energy of a fuller life. . . . She tried to read it [a twisted suicide note], but failed. The girl beside her saw her slip back, fainting, on her pillows.”¹⁴ In Delia Blanchflower, conflagrations and demonstrations make up the atmosphere of violence.

Various contemporary reviewers criticized Mrs Ward’s use of violent episodes as a melodramatic ploy that demonstrated a pandering to popular appeal in her later fiction. Other reviewers sometimes praised the quality of “intensity” in her heroines’ experiences but complained that her works lacked humour. In some respects, the charge of melodrama is a simplistic reading because it tends to cheapen the temper of Mrs Ward’s sensitivity to the challenging readjustments that women faced as they took on new roles in twentieth-century life. A prime example of this critical problem is Mrs Ward’s final novel Harvest, which was published several weeks after her death in the spring of 1920. During World War I, women performed jobs that had previously been reserved for men only. Mrs Ward shows the expanding roles for women by depicting female characters in Harvest who first attend agricultural training at a college and then lease and manage a farm together in the English countryside. The essential story of this final novel is the independent spirit and pioneer experiences of the two heroines, Rachel Henderson and Janet Leighton. However, because of the melodramatic ending of the story–Rachel’s crazed former husband Roger returns and shoots her–there is a natural tendency to focus upon that one violent episode.

In many respects the harvest metaphor is a memorable one for contemplating the development of Mrs Ward’s career as a novel i st. Her first stunning success, Robert Elsmere, focused on the religious doubts of a thoughtful male Victorian clergyman. That novel ends with the hero’s death in London and with thoughts of The New Brotherhood. It closes with an appropriate quotation from Arthur Hugh Clough–the same lines that appear on her own grave stone in Aldbury churchyard:

“Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
And (they forgotten and unknown)
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown.”

The harvest of autumn is a central metaphor in her final novel whose very title emphasizes this fact. It takes place in a rural setting and its main concern involves not Victorian religious conflict but issues of twentieth-century women’s identity and independence, impetuosity and reserve, amidst the tumultuous changes brought by the post-World War I experience.

This Victorian research guide has been a joint effort of William B. Thesing and Stephen Pulsford. It has been a rewarding collaborative enterprise as we have shared our reactions to the novels, collected anecdotes and reviews, searched for inaccessible periodicals and publications, and struggled with computer technologies. We divided our efforts to some degree: Stephen Pulsford was principally responsible for compiling the primary bibliography entries and for discussing novels written between 1880 and 1900 in the introductory essay. William B. Thesing was principally responsible for compiling the secondary bibliography and the review entries and for discussing novels written between 1900 and 1920 in the introduction. We both wish to express our gratitude to Joel Myerson, Chairman, Department of English, University of South Carolina, and John Kimmey, Director, Graduate Studies in English at the University of South Carolina, for providing research support for this project. Modestine Redden assisted with the final preparation of the manuscript. We also thank Amelia Butler who worked during the summer of 1987 as a student assistant. She meticulously verified and cheerfully gathered many items from the library. We express further gratitude to the excellent staff in the reference and inter-library loan departments of Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, for their untiring willingness to answer our many requests. Daniel Boice, Catherine Gottlieb, Dennis Isbell, and Marcia Martin were especially helpful to us. We are grateful as well to staff members of the libraries of Indiana University, Washington University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Boston University where further research was conducted.

Around the turn of the century, several bibliographers listed the writings of Mrs Ward. With a renewed interest in women’s and Victorian studies in the 1970s and 1980s, several partial bibliographies appeared. N. W. Webster’s listing of all first British editions of her works appeared in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review in 1975. William S. Peterson’s excellent study, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s ‘Robert Elsmere’ (1976), has in its appendix a fairly complete listing of material related to Robert Elsmere as well as other useful categories such as articles, introductions, and prefaces by Mrs Ward. Peter Collister identified additional unsigned articles by Mrs Ward. Esther Marian Greenwell Smith provided a secondary bibliography with succinct annotations at the end of her Twayne study (1980). Information on editions and reprintings of Mrs Ward’s works is drawn from these sources, as well as other published sources, including The National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints, the catalogue of the British Library, and The English Catalogue of Books. Title page transcriptions, however, are taken from copies examined by us.

The original contribution of our bibliography is a far more expansive listing of the various editions of her novels published in Britain, America, and other countries. Information concerning title pages is also provided. Listings of her non-fiction books and pamphlets, translations, plays, and collections are also given full treatment here. Another original contribution of our bibliography is to offer the most comprehensive listing of reviews of Mrs Ward’s novels ever published. Furthermore, the secondary bibliography is the most complete that has been compiled to date. We welcome corrections and additions to our efforts.

William B. Thesing, University of South Carolina and Stephen Pulsford, Francis Marion College

Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 412. [↩]
Letter from Mrs Ward to Tom Arnold, 15 November 1896, quoted in William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s ‘Robert Elsmere’ (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), p. 41. [↩]
Letter from Mrs Ward to Tom Arnold, Easter Monday, 1898, quoted in Peterson, p. 42. [↩]
Esther Marian Greenwell Smith, Mrs Humphry Ward (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 25. [↩]
Smith, p. 28. [↩]
Smith, p. 29. [↩]
Mrs Humphry Ward, “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” The Nineteenth Century, 25 (June 1889): 781-788. [↩]
For a more extensive discussion of Mrs Ward’s articles and her novel Delia B1anchf1ower, see William B. Thesing, “Mrs Humphry Ward’s Anti-Suffrage Campaign: From Polemics to Art,” Turn-of-the-Century Women, 1 (Summer 1984): 22-35. [↩]
Enid Huws Jones, Mrs Humphry Ward (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 155. [↩]
See Vineta Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 111-174. [↩]
Peterson, p. 59. [↩]
Mrs Humphry Ward, Delia Blanchflower (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914), pp. 243-244. [↩]
See Esther M. G. Smith, “Mrs Humphry Ward,” in Victorian Novelists After 1885, ed. Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983), pp. 297-303. [↩]
Mrs Humphry Ward, The Coryston Family (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913), pp. 277-278. [↩]