Freepedia is a series of free encyclopaedias. We currently specialize in history but we intend to branch out into other areas. This section is about Mary Augusta Arnold.

Mary Augusta Arnold, the grand-daughter of Dr. Thomas Arnold, was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1851. She returned to England with her family in 1856 and was brought up in Oxford.

In 1872 Mary married Thomas Humphry Ward, a fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. Nine years later, the couple moved to London and soon afterwards Mary had her first book, Millie and Olly (1881) published. Her second novel, Robert Elsmere (1888) was an instant success and was translated into several different languages.

Books such as The History of David Grieve (1892), Marcella (1894), Sir George Tressaday (1896), Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898), Eleanor (1900) and Lady Rose's Daughter (1903) established Ward as one of Britain's most popular novelists.

Many of Ward's books concerned the need to help the less fortunate in society. However, despite her sympathy for the poor, she was totally opposed to women's suffrage. In 1908 Humphry Ward was approached by Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon and asked to become the first president of the Anti-Suffrage League. Humphry Ward agreed and over the next few years she played an important role in the campaign to prevent women being given the vote.

Humphry Ward argued the case against women's suffrage at debates at Newnham College and Girton College. Once a role model for educated young women, Humphry Ward received a hostile reception from the students. She recorded in her diary after the Girton debate that "the fire and the rage were immense" and blamed the staff who she accused of being "hotly suffrage".

Humphry Ward became editor of the journal, the Anti-Suffrage Review and as well as writing a large number of articles on the subject, several of her novels, notably, The Testing of Diana Mallory (1908) and Delia Blanchflower (1915) criticised women's suffrage campaigners.

Her son, Arnold Ward, the Conservative MP for Watford, played a significant role in the House of Commons in trying to prevent women getting the vote. Even during the First World War, when other leading campaigners such as Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon had withdrawn their objections, Ward continued to vote against giving women the franchise.

After the death of her sister, Julia Huxley, in 1908, Humphry Ward devoted much of her time to the care of her nephews Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley.

It was claimed that by 1914 Humphry Ward was the best-known Englishwomen in America. Charles Masterman and Sir Gilbert Parker, of the government's War Propaganda Bureau, suggested that Humphry Ward might like to write a book encouraging the American public to support Britain's war effort. She replied that she would if the government was able to compensate her for the financial "losses from the war and the pressure of war taxation". This was arranged and in March 1915, Humphry Ward became the first woman journalist to visit the Western Front. As a result of the tour of the front-line, Humphry Ward wrote two books, England's Effort (1916) and Towards the Goal (1917).

Humphry Ward's autobiography, A Writer's Recollections, was published in 1918. Humphry Ward's final years were spent worrying about the debts of her son, Arnold Ward, who was a compulsive gambler. Mary Humphry Ward died on 26th March, 1920. In order to pay Ward's creditors, Thomas Humphry Ward had to sell-off the family home.

Mary Humphrey Ward

Mary Humphrey Ward: Wikipedia

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Forum Debates

War Propaganda Bureau

Mary Humphrey Ward

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(1) Mary Humphrey Ward, The Times (27th February, 1909)

Women's suffrage is a more dangerous leap in the dark than it was in the 1860s because of the vast growth of the Empire, the immense increase of England's imperial responsibilities, and therewith the increased complexity and risk of the problems which lie before our statesmen - constitutional, legal, financial, military, international problems - problems of men, only to be solved by the labour and special knowledge of men, and where the men who bear the burden ought to be left unhampered by the political inexperience of women.

(2) In her autobiography, A Writer's Recollections, Mary Humphrey Ward described her visit to the Western Front. Soon after arriving in France she heard about the death of her friend, Henry James.

All through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills south-east of Poperinghe, the ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement and novelty of the great spectacle around us. I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead sons of England, dead for her; but even though their ghostly voices came the voice of Henry James, who spiritually, had fought in their fight and suffered in their pain.

(3) Mary Humphrey Ward's daughter, Dorothy Ward, recorded in her diary when she heard that the House of Lords had passed the bill for women's suffrage by 134 to 71.

We have been betrayed by our leader Lord Curzon. Coward! After making a long anti-suffrage speech, with every appearance of believing in the arguments against the Vote which he was advancing - he suddenly announced that in view of the gravity of the conflict with the Commons at this moment he was not going to vote and advised noble Lords not to vote.

(4) John Buchan, letter to Mary Humphrey Ward (December, 1918)

It would have been impossible to essay the great task of enlightening foreign countries as to the justice of the Allied cause and the magnitude of the British effort without the co-operation of our leading writers, and we have been most fortunate in receiving that co-operation in full and ungrudged measure.