These past two months have taken me on a somewhat unexpected foray through some of Great Britain’s Catholic fiction writers, ranging from the old salts like Evelyn Waugh through to the recently deceased David Lodge (who, I am happy to report, is also a recent favorite of Commonweal’s Dominic Preziosi). A name new to me that kept cropping up was one perhaps unfamiliar to most American Catholics—though not because of her lack of influence: Josephine Ward.
Ward penned 13 books over the course of a 45-year writing career, including 10 novels. She shared a surname with a far more famous female writer of the same era, the Australian-born Mary Augusta Ward (G. K. Chesterton once suggested the two should star together in a comic opera), but was a successful writer and public intellectual in her own right. The historian Elizabeth Huddleston has called Josephine Ward and her husband Wilfrid “two of the most influential Catholic voices in England at the time of the modernist controversy,” noting that Ward’s “voice is essential for an understanding of the social and religious implications of the modernist crisis in England in particular, but also in the greater Anglophone sphere.”
Born in 1864 to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother (the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk!), Josephine Hope-Scott was adopted and raised by her maternal grandmother. In 1887, she married the historian Wilfrid Philip Ward. Among his publications were biographies of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and Cardinal John Henry Newman, and was later the publisher of The Dublin Review. The couple was confidantes of Hilaire Belloc, the aforementioned Chesterton, the Jesuit C. C. Martindale and Francis Thompson, among others (if you’re of a certain age and went to Catholic school, you remember the last because you had to memorize his poem, “The Hound of Heaven”).
Josephine Ward, who published under the name “Mrs. Wilfrid Ward,” wrote her first book, In The Way, the year the couple married. Probably her most famous work, the novel One Poor Scruple, appeared 12 years later and was a critical and commercial success. Focused on an upper-class couple who are in love but can’t marry because one is divorced, it has been described by the scholar Bernard Bergonzi as an early example of the British “Catholic novel” later associated with Waugh and Lodge, among others.
She and Wilfrid, who died in 1916, had five children, among them Maisie Ward, who would later marry Frank Sheed. In 1926, with seed money from Josephine Ward, the couple founded and ran the venerable Catholic publishing company Sheed & Ward (it’s still around, now as an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield). Frank and Maisie’s son Wilfrid Sheed was an underappreciated novelist and literary critic in his own right who wrote for Commonweal for many years; no editor of a Catholic magazine will remain unscathed after a reading of his The Hack or Office Politics.
Josephine was a strong critic of Catholic modernism, and many of her novels featured protagonists struggling to reconcile au courant political and religious ideas with the structures and strictures of the Catholic Church. She was also politically very active, including in the Catholic Evidence Guild and in campaigns against women’s suffrage. Her daughter Maisie described Josephine’s appearances at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park in London, writing that her mother’s activism probably shocked her high-society peers; she was “in her late fifties, traditionally educated, wearing the widow’s dress that was still customary.”
Josephine Ward died in 1932, the same year her final novel, Tudor Sunset, was published. In a 1935 review in America of Maisie Ward’s biography of her parents, The Wilfrid Wards and The Transition, William H. McCabe noted that the couple’s social circle “is necessarily an English litany of the nineteenth-century greats in various fields.”
A 1906 review in The Catholic World of Ward’s novel Out of Due Time described her importance to Catholic literature at the time. Her writing, wrote the reviewer James J. Fox, “proved that a religious novel, extolling Catholic ideals, when written with ability, truthfulness, and a knowledge of life, could command the favorable attention of non-Catholics, and might be a very efficient exposition and winning defence of Catholic truth, securing attention in quarters, closed, and guarded by the twin sentinels of prejudice and contemptuous indifference, against any literature making a formal plea for Catholicism.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Prayer of Unseeking Despair,” by Gretchen Tessmer. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
