MARY WARD AS CRITIC OF MATTHEW ARNOLD

Abstract

The literary criticism of Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward, née Arnold, has received little attention, although she wrote 15 reviews for Macmillan's Magazine in the 1880s, plus prefaces to the Brontë novels over 1899–1902. This article considers some of this criticism in the context of Ward's response to the writings of her uncle, Matthew Arnold. Ward's Arnold heritage was central to her sense of identity, but as a female she struggled for the scholarly education that her male relatives took for granted. The article focuses mainly on Ward's review for Macmillan's Magazine in March 1884 of a new edition of Keats, but also discusses her Brontë prefaces. In dealing with Keats, a poet Arnold treats several times, Ward diverges markedly from her uncle's approach, in ways that both reflect the struggle for learning that she shared with Keats himself and look forward to twentieth-century approaches to the poet. In the Brontë prefaces, she stresses the Brontë family's “Celtic” heritage in a mode which is clearly indebted to Matthew Arnold, but also suggests that her uncle's tribute to Emily Brontë, in poetry rather than criticism, showed a “Celtic” dimension of Arnold himself that his critical writing sometimes concealed. The prefaces show as well, however, that, unlike Arnold, Ward was interested in the traits specific to women's fiction.