Mrs Ward
Norman Vance
Helbeck of Bannisdale Mrs Humphry Ward, edited and introduced by Brian Worthington (Penguin £2.95)
t is time we started reading Mrs Humphry
Ward again. Penguin have done us a good turn with their new edition of Helbeck of Bannisdale, one of her best novels. The book is well produced, with an informative critical introduction and helpful notes, though we could have had more of them. While lesser woman writers have been modishly revived, or at least reprinted, in the last few years Mary Ward has remained in dignified obscurity, much loved by in- tellectual historians and Victorian specialists but largely unknown to the wider public she once enjoyed. An authority on early Spanish history and literature, a pioneer social worker, a champion of higher education for women, one of the first woman magistrates in the country, a notorious anti-suffragette and a best-selling novelist, she was a controversial but con- siderable figure in her own day. She does not deserve to be forgotten: it is not as if she had devoted herself to forgotten issues. We are still concerned, as she was, with the problems of the inner city and labour rela- tions, with the rise in the divorce rate and the role of education in social change. Newspapers still insist on connections bet- ween personal and political morality so that public figures seldom enjoy completely private lives, a recurring theme in her later novels. Recent rows about the Alternative Service Book and The Myth of God Incar- nate show that the church and the modern world, religious tradition and apparently secular society continue in the same uneasy relationship dramatically explored in Mary Ward's Robert Elsemere (1888), a magnificently ambitious novel unfairly disparaged in the Penguin introduction to Helbeck.
The recent television success of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited suggests that the bad fit between religious imperative and the emotional urgencies of ordinary living re- tains the imaginative appeal it exerted on the first readers of Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898). But where Brideshead indulges in the bitter-sweet of an opulent nostalgia which crystalises into a modern miracle- play Helbeck more austerely distills tragedy from the same theme. Helbeck himself is a more attractive version of Bridie, conscient- ious and devout, sprung from an ancient Catholic family (suggested by the Stricklands of Sizergh Castle in Westmorland), apparently destined for a rather tiresome sainthood compounded of celibate asceticism, religious devotion and Catholic charities. He wins our interest and sympathy when he falls deeply in love with Laura Fountain, his sister's free-thinking step-daughter. Unlike Waugh in Brideshead, Mary Ward resists the tempta- tion to go for a pious ending. Where Charles Ryder, the religious outsider, is in- voluntarily drawn into the circle of faith Laura conscientiously cannot become a Catholic even to secure the peace of the man she learns to love. Jane Eyre-like she flees from him; inevitably, she is drawn back again. She can neither accept Catholic marriage nor refuse Helbeck's love, and in despair she drowns herself.
Landscape plays an important part in the emotional structure of the book, as it often does in Mary Ward. Cliffs, woods, rivers and the sea carefully observed in the Kendal area function as metaphors of evanescent serenity and spiritual turbulence. Laura flings herself into a tumultuous river but there is a gay and open stream near where she is buried.
Like Robert Elsmere, Helbeck derives a sensitively imagined individual ordeal from the contemporary religious and intellectual situation. Influenced by Oxford Hegelianism, Mary Ward saw her divinity as the irresistible self-transforming historical process. Among other things, this rendered obsolescent the more conventional structure of religious awareness and wor- ship, leaving the emotion and the ethics of traditional Christianity seeking new forms of expression. This is investigated at length in Robert Elsemere, which moves from happy traditional pieties in her beloved Lake District to post-Christian ethical en- thusiasm and devoted social work in the West End. Laura Fountain's father had been an important figure in this work of post-Christian reconstruction, a man not unlike Mary Ward's friend Leslie Stephen, author of An Agnostic's Apology, or Dar- win's 'bulldog' T. H. Huxley, her sister's father-in-law. Discontent with dogmatic or- thodoxy in the Anglican Church had been rumbling for more than half a century, associated with figures like Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Mary Ward's grandfather. Her uncle Matthew Arnold had taken things considerably further, simplifying religion into ethics heightened by emotion. But the rising tide of liberalism had provoked its own reaction in the Oxford Movement. Newman audibly wondered whether Dr Ar- nold was a Christian at all. When Newman finally despaired of the Church of England many followed him into the Roman Catholic fold, including Mary's father Thomas Arnold the younger. The effect on the Catholic church in England was to push it further away than ever before from Englishness and liberal Anglicanism, en- couraging its claim to be the only true church with a devotional life heavily in- fluenced by continental asceticism and stif- fened by an unwavering dogmatism. This was the Catholicism of Helbeck and of Mary Ward's father, self-consciously op- posed to the Protestant and agnostic liberalism of Laura Fountain and Mary Ward herself. The conflict is fairly and
The Speeta'or 17 September 19k3 sympathetically portrayed in the nov,.el because it reproduces the conflict in Te the author's own family, and indeed in , author herself. Though the heir of a lib era! tradition and the pupil of the scePtical Mark Pattison, she was attracted by Ehe al; ner certainties and devotional intensities co her father's religion to the extent that a. 'Catholic reviewer observed that parts °I Helbeck read like an edifying treatise 111' a Catholic author. Of the 19th-century novel' ists only George Eliot achieved a CO parable insight into religious views she tellectually rejected. With this gift of sympathy, with het, social concern and her intellectnad' seriousness, it seems harsh that Mary Wat„ should be neglected now. But LYtta" Strachey and the brash anti-Victoriansi disliked her sometimes humourless Ora seriousness. Her conservative opposition t°, votes for women, a theme of overshadowed a animates novels her las'
liberalism Work,
Technically her fiction was in the traa'„ wmeadtes hthere best tional mode. By comparison with JoYcea" experimentalism and Lawrentian apocalY1); ticism she seemed very old hat indeed. ea, Lawrence read her work with interest an' drew on the plot of Lady Connie (1916)f°r Lady Chatterly's Lover. The Ulster eitt: perience suggests that her obsession wit!' religion and society in the modern wortcl is not yet obsolete.
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