Behind her times
Subtitle: transition England in the novels of Mary Arnold Ward
By: Judith Wilt.
Series: Victorian literature and culture series
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Ward, Humphry, Mrs., 1851-1920 -- Knowledge -- England.; Ward, Humphry, Mrs., 1851-1920 -- Political and social views.; Literature and history -- England -- History -- 19th century.; Literature and history -- England -- History -- 20th century.; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 19th century.; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 20th century.; National characteristics, English, in literature.; Social history in literature.; England -- In literature.
Description: "From 1890 to 1905, Mary Arnold Ward was the best-selling novelist in the English language. As the Edwardian age came to an end, however, she became a target of scorn for modernists such as Virginia Woolf, and today most of her books have fallen out of print. But in her novels we can vividly experience the long transition from Victorian to modern England and see again the high melodrama of science's challenge to Christianity, of political socialism and the social gospel, and of women's suffrage and the First World War."

"In this new critical examination, Judith Wilt sees Ward as being "behind her times" in two senses - in her tireless defense of her evolving era's achievements and intentions, but also in her wariness of the advance of time and of the violence of change. Writing during what she recognized as a period of transition, she dramatized both a welcome of and a resistance to modernity, seeing the social developments of the day as temporary structures, subject to transition themselves."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-234) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : "the great Mary"; title: "All the great parts" : debuting in Miss Bretherton and The Coryston family; title: Robert Elsmere : the Englishman as heretic; title: Marcella : the end of aristocracy; title: Deep waters in Helbeck of Bannisdale; title: "Beauty that must die" : the sex war in Delia Blanchflower; title: Effort's England : Mary Arnold Ward writes the Great War.