The Younger Mrs Ward

Extract

One hundred years ago two Mrs Wards, not related to each other, were writing novels in England. Mrs Humphry Ward had achieved instant fame in 1888 with Robert Elsmere. This story of an earnest clergyman who loses faith in organized religion keyed into Victorian anxieties and controversies about faith and doubt. Its author, born Mary Augusta Arnold, was a granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby and a niece of Matthew Arnold; she was a woman of high intellectual and scholarly attainments, a devout agnostic but keenly interested in religion. Ten years later she turned her attention to Catholicism, in Helbeck of Bannisdale, a character study of a Catholic squire in the Lake District. Mary Ward had good personal reasons for being interested in Catholicism. Her father, Thomas Arnold Junior, was one of the ‘wanderers’ who flit through Victorian religious history. He became a Catholic under Newman’s influence when he was in his thirties, but reverted to Anglicanism some years later. After several more years he returned to the Catholic Church, just in time to stop him from being elected Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which was still dominated by the Anglican establishment. Arnold then remained a Catholic until his death in 1900. In his later years he was Professor of English at University College, Dublin, where he was a friend and colleague of the Professor of Greek, Fr G.M.Hopkins SJ. Arnold’s changes of direction were intensely painful to his non-Catholic family. Mary Ward felt the pain, but she loved her father and tried to understand his beliefs.