Mary Augusta Ward
The late Victorian and Edwardian periods in Britain generated a sustained literary culture in which novelists working in English engaged a broad reading public across multiple forms and registers. Mary Augusta Ward was born into that expanding world of letters on 11 June 1851 in Hobart, and she would go on to work at the centre of it as a writer and editor.
Ward was a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland who wrote in English and worked across several related roles: novelist, literary editor, and children's writer. She published under her married name, Mrs Humphry Ward, and it was under that byline that her novels reached readers. The dual identity — her given name, Mary Augusta Ward, and the name she used professionally — runs through the record of her career, marking her output in adult fiction and her writing for younger readers alike.
As a literary editor as well as a novelist, Ward occupied more than one position within the literary life of her time. Her work in English addressed different audiences, and the range of her roles — fiction writer, editor, writer for children — gives her career a breadth that the single designation of novelist does not entirely convey. She held citizenship in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland throughout the years of her working life.
Ward died in London on 24 March 1920. She received the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a formal honour that stands as the most specific public recognition recorded against her name. That award, together with the body of work she produced under the name Mrs Humphry Ward, constitutes the documented shape of a career that ran from the middle of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth.
Quotes by Mary Augusta Ward
In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow – and trust – the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.
Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance – show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.
A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid, nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class, – too much money, and too few ideas.
Nothing ought to be told, I think that does not interest or kindle one’s own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds.
Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? – the one advantage of time!
The only thing which can keep journalism alive – journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment – is – again the Stevensonian secret! – charm.
City of rest! – as it seems to our modern senses, – how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!
It is the rank and file – the average woman – for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.