Mary Augusta Ward on ‘The Peasant in Literature’

Abstract

Mary Augusta Ward, author of the acclaimed novel Robert Elsmere, was also a critic of some note and influence. In the later years of her career she focused her critical faculties on the figure of the peasant in literature, although she published little on this topic – notable exceptions being comments in her prefaces to the seven-volume Life and Works of the Sisters Brontë and a headnote on Irish writer Emily Lawless in The English Poets, a multivolume work edited by her husband, T.H. Ward and containing her uncle Matthew Arnold’s introductory essay, “The Study of Poetry.” Ward was influenced by Arnold in her own critical endeavors, but she shows on several occasions a willingness to challenge some of the principles of Arnold’s critical theory. Unpublished materials in the Honnold Library at the Claremont Colleges indicate that Ward believed the best literature dealing with peasant life presented a realistic portrait of the hardships these men and women endured. Hence, Ward has mixed feelings about the genre of pastoral, and finds in the work of the Brontës and Thomas Hardy more compelling portraits because these novelists are able to describe the inextricable links between the people and the countryside. Ward was also influenced by Walter Pater, and at times displays a willingness to let impression guide her judgment of literary value. But she is careful to link these feelings with her pity and anger for people subjected to such harsh living conditions.