Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian. Hardcover - 1990

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.. 8vo. 432 pp. Very Good+. Hard Cover. Black cloth covered boards with gilt lettering on spine. Dust Jacket Very Good with some creasing on top. 16 B&W plates. ISBN: 0198185871 9780198185871.Mary Ward, best known to her contemporaries as Mrs. Humphry Ward, was one of the most successful and complex women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into the powerful but patriarchal dynasty of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, she lived at the center of an intellectual and cultural circle peopled by such eminent figures as Mark Pattison, Thomas Huxley, and Charles Darwin. Her novel Robert Elsmere (1888), the first in a series of bestsellers, earned her both unprecedented sums of money and the critical respect of such writers as Henry James. She helped found Somerville College, Oxford, the Universitys first institution of higher education of women, and helped create a number of play centers for the children of Londons working poor. And as the first woman reporter to enter the trenches in 1916, she wrote articles that were instrumental in bringing America into the war. In Mrs. Humphry Ward, John Sutherland explores a goldmine of materials never before available to recapture a fascinating life, one in which extraordinary achievements were often overshadowed by private misfortune. From the library of John Crichton of Brick Row.