In 1921, Wharton wrote to Sinclair Lewis, thanking him for his letter of congratulation about the Pulitzer Prize she had just won for The Age of Innocence. She told him that “I had long since resigned myself to the idea that I was regarded by you all as the — say the Mrs. Humphry Ward of the Western Hemisphere; though at times I wondered why.”

Lewis had written to tell Wharton how much he admired her work, even though the Pulitzer jury’s choice of his own novel Main Street had been overruled by the trustees of Columbia University. The trustees had chosen The Age of Innocence instead, as worthy of the prize awarded “for the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Wharton told Lewis that “when I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair.” Although she accepted the prize, she was uneasy about being designated the upholder of wholesome American virtues. She was reassured, she said, by Lewis’s letter, and she concluded by telling him that “if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save fiction in America.

Both Edith Wharton and Mary Ward were best-selling novelists whose writing was strongly influenced by tradition, and both preferred to argue for women’s capabilities more than for their rights. Henry James was friends with both of them — despite being suspicious or envious of their popular successes — and the two women were on friendly terms with each other, although they were never very close. In the summer of 1914, Wharton rented Ward’s country house Stocks, near Tring in Buckinghamshire. She spent very little time there because of the outbreak of war, but before she returned home to Paris, she stayed for a while in Ward’s house in London, in Grosvenor Place, while the Ward family returned to Stocks.

Wharton’s reputation as an important American novelist is secure, but Mary Ward is a contradictory character, and history is not sure what to do with her. Ward can’t be ignored entirely — she was one of the best-selling novelists, and one of the most energetic philanthropists, of the nineteenth century. Yet there has been no dramatic resurgence of interest in her, even in the decades since the publication of John Sutherland’s excellent biography, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (1990). Reading Ward can be at times delightful and entertaining, at other times excessively didactic and irritating. Sometimes, however, difficult people are worth knowing.

Here’s a portrait of Mary Ward in 1889, when she was 38, one year after the publication of her most famous novel, Robert Elsmere:

"Mrs. Ward in 1889," from The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (1923), by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

And here’s a portrait of Edith Wharton from 1905, when she was 43 and had just published the first of her best-known novels, The House of Mirth:

Both women adopt a conventional pose, but nevertheless, the similarity is striking.

In Wharton’s story “The Spark,” set in 1890’s New York but looking back to the 1860’s, there is a dinner party — a “man’s dinner,” it’s called — hosted by the narrator’s mother.  Several Civil War veterans are invited, and the narrator persuades his mother to invite his friend Hayley Delane because he wants to see if Delane will discuss his own experiences in the war with these men. It turns out later that Delane met the poet Walt Whitman during the war, and that in times of moral crisis Whitman’s voice prompts him to make unconventional choices. But at the dinner he does not speak of his experiences, unlike Major Detrancy, for example, who prefaces every statement with “When a fellow’s been through the war….” The narrator observes that in contrast to the other men, Delane “had gone on growing” morally, yet “intellectually they were all on a par.”

The example Wharton chooses to illustrate the lack of intellectual growth is a misunderstood reference to the novels of Mary Ward:

When the last new play at Wallack’s was discussed, or my mother tentatively alluded to the last new novel by the author of Robert Elsmere (it was her theory that, as long as the hostess was present at a man’s dinner, she should keep the talk at the highest level), Delane’s remarks were no more penetrating than his neighbours’ — and he was almost sure not to have read the novel.

Wharton avoids referring to Ward by name, but the reference to Robert Elsmere would have been easily recognizable to her readers, if not to her characters. As Sutherland says in his biography, Robert Elsmere was probably the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century.

If Mary Ward was the Dan Brown or the J.K. Rowling of her day, why don’t we know more about her now? One of the reasons has to be that popular novels come and go, but another reason is that Ward herself is not seen as likeable. Even in her own time, she had a reputation as a self-righteous, moralistic novelist, and the phrase “Virtue is its Humphry Ward” was coined by a member of the Queen’s Acre set, a group of friends — many of them also Wharton’s friends — who often gathered at the writer Howard Sturgis’s country house in Windsor, Berkshire.

In “The Spark,” as the narrator’s mother prepares to withdraw from the dinner and leave the men to their punch, one of the guests says, “Abandoning us to go back to Mr. Elsmere — we shall be jealous of the gentleman!”  If the narrator’s mother is reading Ward herself, however, it is not Robert Elsmere, but the “new novel,” which could be any of the five Ward published during the 1890’s: The History of David Grieve (1892), Marcella (1894), The Story of Bessie Costrell (1895), Sir George Tressady (1896), or Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898). The gentlemen whose lives were defined by their experience in the ’Sixties are not up to date on the literature of the ’Nineties, and Wharton, writing in the 1920’s, is gently mocking both the misunderstood reference to Robert Elsmere, and the intellectual pretensions of a woman who sees Mary Ward’s moralistic novels as the height of literary achievement.

By 1924, when “The Spark” appeared in Old New York, Mary Ward was out of date and laughable. She was one of those popular writers the world stopped reading as soon as she died, which was in 1920, at the age of 70. In addition to being popular, she was earnest in her desire to change the morality and even the religion of her readers. Robert Elsmere is a tale of religious controversy in which the marriage between the Church of England clergyman and his devout wife Catherine is strained when Elsmere becomes convinced that the new morality is to be found in a religion that accepts Jesus as a moral teacher, but denies the resurrection. Ward dramatized the shattering of traditional belief in a novel of ideas that was accessible to a large audience, and her nineteenth-century readers were fascinated by her unorthodox approach.

Although she was unconventional in her ideas about religion, Ward was self-righteously conventional in her ideas about politics, and in the early part of the twentieth century her literary reputation suffered as she began to resist and then to denounce the campaign for women’s suffrage. In 1908 she agreed to become the first president of the Anti-Suffrage League, and she edited the Anti-Suffrage Review and wrote several articles on the subject. Although Tolstoy had described her as “the greatest living English writer,” and many of her contemporaries had seen her as George Eliot’s natural successor, Ward didn’t change with the times in a new century, and was often mocked for her old-fashioned ideas and morality. Max Beerbohm, for example, nicknamed her “Ma Hump,” and caricatured her as standing in the shadow of her Uncle Matthew Arnold. She certainly did live in the shadows of her famous uncle and of her famous grandfather, Thomas Arnold.  After she published her first novel in 1884, Matthew Arnold said that “No Arnold can write a novel: if they could, I should have done it” — thereby slighting both Mary Ward and his brother William, who had published a novel thirty years previously.

Sutherland suggests that Ward’s desire for financial success led her later in her career to write inferior novels. The later distaste for her work probably also had to do with the repercussions of Lytton Strachey’s attitude toward her as a relic of the Eminent Victorians he criticized so vehemently in his 1918 book — Strachey’s attack on Thomas Arnold was in part inspired by his dislike of Mary Ward. George Gissing and Arnold Bennett also disliked Ward’s work, and Oscar Wilde said Robert Elsmere was “simply Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, with the literature left out.”

Like Wharton, Ward was something of a moralist and something of an iconoclast. Both women were powerful and energetic in their personal and professional lives, both were far more active and lively than their husbands, and both took charge of and ran large volunteer organizations — Ward on behalf of London’s working poor, Wharton on behalf of war-time refugees. In fact, Mary Ward’s legacy as an organizer of charities is in much better shape right now than her literary reputation. In 1890, Ward founded the Passmore Edwards Settlement, later renamed Mary Ward House, in London. The settlement seems to have been partly inspired by the more or less Unitarian community founded by her character Robert Elsmere. It offered play centres for children and fully-equipped classrooms for children with disabilities — both the first of their kind in London — and hosted lectures, concerts, and meetings of various clubs. The Mary Ward Centre in Bloomsbury is still an adult education centre. Ward was also instrumental in the founding of Somerville College and was supportive of education for women, despite her participation in the Anti-Suffrage League.

Wharton’s comparison of herself with Mary Ward, as perhaps “the Mrs. Humphry Ward of the Western Hemisphere,” is a suggestive one. It raises the question of how the novelist of manners can write about the values of the past and still be taken seriously in the present and into the future, it reminds us that novels about morals always risk moralizing, and it points to tensions having to do with the countries about which one moralizes. The quest “to save fiction in America” is both lighthearted and serious — Wharton recognizes that part of the problem of Ward’s reputation is that she was almost wholly serious. If Wharton was trying to save fiction in America, Ward had tried to save fiction (not to mention religion and education) in England, but the ethical goal of “saving fiction” is a problematic one, which Wharton realized, even if Ward did not see these problems as clearly. A number of Ward’s novels are well worth reading – Helbeck of Bannisdale in particular is reminiscent of George Eliot’s novels in its examination of religious convictions and controversy, Marcella explores the question of women’s suffrage, and despite its heavily didactic tone, Robert Elsmere is a fascinating story about a man struggling with his conscience.

For Further Reading:

Helbeck of Bannisdale, Marcella, and Robert Elsmere are available from Project Gutenberg.

Ashton, Rosemary. “Doubting Clerics: From James Anthony Froude to Robert Elsmere via George Eliot.” The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe, ed. David Jasper and T.R. Wright. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.

Emsley, Sarah. “The Reputation of Mary Augusta Arnold (Mrs. Humphry) Ward.” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 7 (2003): 53-64.

Gates, Barbara T. “Century’s End: The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live.” Chapter 8 in Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007.

Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Vintage, 1993.

Lewis, R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Macmillan, 1988.

Sutherland, John. Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Thompson, Nicola Diane. “Responding to the Woman Questions: Rereading Noncanonical Victorian Women Novelists.” Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ward, Mary. Helbeck of Bannisdale. 1898. London: Penguin, 1983.

—. Marcella. 1894. Ed. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Nicole B. Meller. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002.

—. Robert Elsmere. London: Smith, Elder, 1888.

Wharton, Edith. “The Spark.” Old New York. 1924. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Today is Edith Wharton’s 150^th birthday, and I’m thinking about ways to celebrate, in addition to rereading her work. There’s a short birthday video on the website of The Mount, the house Wharton designed and built in the Berkshires; there are recent articles on her as a role-model for latter-day feminists, by Anita Brookner, and on rich American Wharton heroines who marry European aristocrats, by Pat Ryan; there is a New York Times slideshow that focuses on Wharton-related landmarks in New York City; and there’s a guest post at Austenprose by Lev Raphael, who remarks that when watching “Downton Abbey,” he feels as if he’s “living in an Edith Wharton novel. More than one, in fact.” Pat Ryan also analyzes connections between Wharton’s novels and the world of “Downton Abbey,” and says that Julian Fellowes, creator of the PBS miniseries, points to Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) as one of his influences.

The heroine of The Custom of the Country, my own favourite Wharton novel, is always in search of “something still better beyond,” something “more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her!” Disappointed with her early forays into society, Undine Spragg vows, “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York.” Disappointed with New York, she tries Europe, but no matter what combination of money and power she enjoys, even when she has “everything she wanted,” she still feels, “at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”

Wharton satirizes Undine’s ambitions, but she also understood them. In a diary entry twenty years after the novel was published, she made a note about satisfaction: “Satisfied! What a beggary state! Who would be satisfied with being satisfied?” Late in her career she wrote, “As my work reaches its close I feel so sure that it is either nothing or more than they know. And I wonder, a little desolately, which?” Current critical opinion is quite certain that it is far more than “nothing.” Two of the highlights for me among recent books are Hermione Lee’s biography, Edith Wharton, and a volume of essays on The Custom of the Country, edited by Laura Rattray. There are lots of other even more recent books and articles on Wharton and her work, and many more birthday tributes on the web. I wonder if Wharton would be satisfied with the things we say and write about her? (And I wonder what she’d think of the way her photograph is animated in the video from The Mount, to make it look as if she’s blowing out the “150” candles?)

Come and join us to talk about “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in Sense and Sensibility, along with other intriguing topics such as duels, portrait miniatures and hairwork, plots and “dark subplots,” iconography, letters, Emma Thompson’s film adaptation of the novel, connections between Frankenstein’s monster and the Dashwood sisters, and a defense of Edward Ferrars as a hero.  You can find the essays published in Persuasions On-Line 32.1 (2011) here.

Many thanks to Catherine Morley for her fascinating talk at Dalhousie about connections between the clear fluids recommended in hospitals today, and the beef tea, barley water, and gruel of Jane Austen’s time.

Chawton House Library Reading Room

Dr. Morley is currently researching the history of feeding practices in hospitals, and she spent a month in 2010 as a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House Library, where she studied cookery books from Austen’s time.  More information about her time in Chawton is available on her blog “Summer in Chawton.”  You can read her comments on what children ate in Austen’s time here.

We are delighted that Catherine moved to Nova Scotia from BC this year, so that we can welcome her as new member of JASNA Nova Scotia as well.  We’re looking forward to hearing about her research, and hope you can join us on January 6th.  Best wishes for a happy new year!

Edited to add the time of Catherine’s talk: 3:45 pm.  Thanks to the readers who reminded me.

At our house, we’re enjoying two new Advent calendars. One is an Eric Carle Christmas tree with ornaments, and the other is a row of little handmade bags with chocolates and maple candies inside–and a beautiful handmade book necklace (made by Terry Durnavich) in the last one. My daughter and I worked on the little bags together, inspired by the kind of sewing projects Amanda Blake Soule describes in Handmade Home. While there isn’t an Advent calendar project in the book, the way she incorporates children’s artwork into things like tablerunners and bookmarks made me think we could do something similar for Advent. My daughter has also drawn tiny pictures of people, including Baby Jesus, to go in the bags. We’ve used ribbon to tie the bags to a curtain rod that hangs in our kitchen, which we usually use to display my daughter’s paintings and drawings. We call it the “imagination bar,” and it, too, was inspired by Amanda Blake Soule.  Her earlier book The Creative Family suggests using a rod or wire to display an ever-changing collection of artwork along with other bits and pieces of things, such as autumn leaves, that inspire children to create new art.

Carleton House was built by Richard Bulkeley
around 1759, and it is the oldest stone building, the oldest residence, and the third-oldest building in Halifax.  Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1717, Bulkeley came to Halifax in 1749 as aide-de-camp to Governor Cornwallis.  In 1750 he married nineteen-year-old Mary Rous, with whom he had four sons.  After she died of tuberculosis in 1775, he married Mary Burgess.  Bulkeley’s obituary in 1800 said that he had served as

“Secretary and Register of the Province to thirteen succeeding Governors, up to the present his Excellency Sir John Wentworth Bart.–at all times, revered, respected, and looked up to” (Royal Gazette, December 9, 1800).

During his fifty-one years in Halifax, Richard Bulkeley also served as judge of the Vice Admiralty Court; contributed to the building of St. Paul’s Church, serving as warden and choir director there; and helped found King’s College, the Charitable Irish Society, and the first agricultural society in Nova Scotia.  He is remembered as well for the dinner he hosted on Christmas Day in 1791, for more than two hundred of the poor people of Halifax.

According to his obituary, “Inflexible integrity marked the character of the deceased, either in public or private Life; he united and possessed a clear understanding, and above all a good heart, ever assisting the needy, and a stranger to all littleness of mind; Mathematics was one of his favourite studies; that, together with the Dead and Living Languages rendered him full of information which he was as ready ever to communicate; to his latest moments he was cheerful, and preserved all greatness of mind which a clear and good conscience can only inspire.–He may be said to have long been the Father of the Province.”

More information about Bulkeley can be found in Carleton House: Living History in Halifax, by Paul A. Erickson and Graeme F. Duffus (Halifax, NS: Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia/Nimbus, 1997), and in my book St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade (Halifax, NS: Formac, 1999).  The Carleton website includes a portrait of Bulkeley, held in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia.

We visited several of the sites in PEI associated with Montgomery: the

The view from Montgomery's room in Bideford

one-room school where she taught in Lower Bedeque, the parsonage where she boarded when she taught in Bideford, her Campbell cousins’ house (now the Anne of Green Gables Museum), her Grandfather Montgomery’s house at Park Corner, and, of course, “Green Gables.”  We went to “Anne of Green Gables: The Musical” (the longest running musical in Canada, newly updated this year), and to “Anne and Gilbert” (now in its seventh season, a musical based on the second and third “Anne” books).  We listened to Anne of Green Gables on CD while driving to and around the Island.  We started reading the novel aloud before we left, and we’re still reading a little bit every day.  And while we didn’t get tired of the story, the death of Matthew Cuthbert at the end is so sad that I began to wish, for my daughter’s sake, that we were reading Pride and Prejudice instead, because no main characters die.  (However, there is no green hair or raspberry cordial in Austen’s novels either, and if I couldn’t see the humour in Pride and Prejudice when I was a teenager, it might be just a little early for my daughter to read it).  The musicals were both wonderful, except that the ending of “Anne of Green Gables” was too abrupt, and the focus was still more on Matthew’s death than on the new beginning of Anne’s friendship with Gilbert.  The book is more hopeful about what lies around “the bend in the road” for Anne.

We loved visiting Montgomery’s world, reading and rereading scenes from her most famous novel, and drinking raspberry cordial at the Blue Winds Tea Room in New London.  My daughter is keen to try making raspberry cordial at home, though she agrees with me that someone in the PEI tourism business should be marketing currant wine as well, because no one actually drinks raspberry cordial in the book.  Anne accidentally serves currant wine instead to her “bosom friend” Diana, and gets her drunk.  My daughter has been inspired to re-create this scene, along with the “broken slate” scene, the “green hair” scene, and the scene in which Anne arrives at Green Gables, and she often acts them out at home.  I’m sure seeing the musicals played a role in her newfound interest in performance, but I know she is also inspired to act out these scenes because she saw them performed a few times at “Avonlea” in Cavendish.  She was fascinated with the actors who played Anne, Diana, Gilbert, Matthew, Marilla, and Charlie Sloane–this Charlie plays a much larger role at Avonlea than he does in the books–and she loved the playground, the sandcastles by Maurice Bernard, the wagon rides, the farm animals, the sack races, the square dancing, and the opportunity to dress in period costume and play the role of Anne herself.  When we visited PEI a couple of years ago, we went to Green Gables, but were disappointed to find that “Anne” wasn’t there.  My daughter was very happy this time to meet someone playing Anne at Avonlea, just up the road from the iconic house.  Green Gables, the Parks Canada site, is the place on which Montgomery based her fictional house and farm, and therefore has some claim to authenticity.  But if you’re going to visit a place that never existed, I think it might as well be a complete fiction, with the fictional characters as well as a fictional setting, like Avonlea Village.

I’m happy that my daughter’s creativity is being fueled by literary pilgrimages to both historical and fictional places, and I was also pleased to find that she was inspired by the music and step-dancing that she saw at Avonlea and at the ceilidhs we went to in Stanley Bridge.  She made up many new songs, including one about “Imagination”: “You’ve got to go the way your imagination’s going….”  The music at Avonlea, with Leon Gallant and Mike Pendergast singing songs like Margie Carmichael Scotto’s “The Red Dirt Road” and other Island favourites, including many of their own songs, was definitely a highlight of the trip.  So was my daughter’s delight in discovering that the drummer, Brendan Peters, also played the role of Anne’s schoolteacher, Mr. Phillips.  It’s worth going to Avonlea for the music alone, whether you’re an Anne fan or not.  Many of the songs are on the band’s new CD, “Songs from the Shanty.”

I have no plans to open a tourist attraction inspired by Longbourn or Pemberley.  But I can already imagine my daughter someday as a lively Elizabeth answering Darcy’s first proposal–“I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry”–and sounding just like Anne rejecting Gilbert.

Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve been looking for ways to share my interest in Austen with her.  I wish there were more books that introduce children to Austen and her novels.  There aren’t many, which is what led me to write “The Jane Austen Playgroup.”  Yes, there are arguments for waiting until she’s at least twelve so she can read one of the novels herself from beginning to end, and for not “spoiling” her experience of the novels, their intricacies and their endings, by reading abridged versions to her or by showing her the Austen movies.  But there are lots of books that introduce children to Shakespeare and other famous writers of stories for grown-ups, so why not Austen?  I think it’s a very good thing to gain an early familiarity with the characters and even the plots of classic literature, so that when one does read them as a teenager or later, the books seem like old friends already.

The other day, I read Marcia Williams’s illustrated–and irreverent–version of The Iliad and The Odyssey with my daughter, and I wished that I had read it myself as a child.  It inspired my daughter to perform what she called “The Dance of the Gods,” which turned out to be quite different from the “Regency Ball” that she sometimes hosts for all her elephants and bears (it was, not surprisingly, a little more wild).  She and I have danced together at more than one ball hosted by the Jane Austen Society of North America.

I suppose there’s a fine balance between sharing my interest in Austen, Shakespeare, and Homer with her, and insisting that she like the same things I like.  Still, I can’t think it a bad thing that she is learning about some of the most important works in Western literature at a young age.  It’s also been fun to come across references to Jane Austen in other works, such as the role Austen’s Marianne Dashwood plays in Jeanne Birdsall’s second Penderwicks novel, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street.  When my daughter reads Sense and Sensibility, she’ll recognize Marianne from that (very funny) appearance in another book that we both love.  (How amusing to find that this Marianne does not–okay, cannot–end up as a “second attachment” for the widowed Mr. Penderwick.)

My daughter is a little old now for the new BabyLit counting book Little Miss Austen: Pride and Prejudice, by Jennifer Adams, but we’ve still enjoyed reading it together.  Counting “5 sisters” or “4 marriage proposals”–with the accompanying illustrations that add (a tiny bit) more depth (Mary’s grammar book, Elizabeth’s “I heart Darcy” dress)–is fun, my daughter loves the “9 fancy ball gowns,” and number 10 makes me smile: “10,000 pounds a year.”  Of course, the extreme oversimplification demanded by a genre that only allows for ten phrases means that the happy ending of the novel is reduced to a matter of money only.  The romance is lost; the moral complexities are nowhere to be seen; there’s none of Austen’s own sparkling dialogue.  This board book offers a haiku-like interpretation of Pride and Prejudice that stresses the importance of Mr. Darcy’s money, the differences among the five Bennet sisters, and the focus on “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” (here “3 houses” in “1 english village”).  But that’s not a bad place to start in understanding Jane Austen.  I’ve given the book to a couple of very young friends of ours, and have kept a copy for my daughter’s collection, too.