Ward, Mary Augusta, known as Mrs Humphry Ward, n�e Arnold 1851-1920
English novelist

She was born in Hobart, Tasmania, the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, and niece of Matthew Arnold. Her family returned to Great Britain (1856), and after attending private boarding schools she joined them in Oxford in 1867. In 1872 she married Thomas Humphry Ward (1845-1926), a Fellow and tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford, and she became secretary to Somerville College, Oxford (1879), before moving to London in 1881, where she wrote for various periodicals. A children's story, Milly and Olly (1881), Miss Bretherton (1884), a slight novel, and a translation (1885) of Henri Amiel's Journal intime preceded her greatest success, the bestselling spiritual romance Robert Elsmere (1888), which inspired the philanthropist Passmore Edwards to found the Tavistock Square settlement for the London poor in 1897. Her later novels, all on social or religious issues, include Marcella (1894), Sir George Tressady (1896) and The Case of Richard Meynell (1911). She was both an enthusiastic social worker and an anti-suffragette, becoming first president of the Anti-Suffrage League in 1908. She published A Writer's Recollections in 1918.

Bibliography: E M Smith, Mrs Humphry Ward (1980)