Reclaiming Mrs. Wilfrid Ward's <i>The Job Secretary</i>: Metafiction and Female Authorship
2006; ELT Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2487/f783-8224-jj7k-q721
ISSN1559-2715
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoReclaiming Mrs. Wilfrid Ward's The Job Secretary: Metafiction and Female Authorship Maria Carla Martino University of Palermo MRS. WILFRID WARD'S reputation has suffered unjustly since her death and her name does not appear in the most recent encyclopedias of women's writing.1 One likely reason for this oblivion lies in Mrs. Ward's commitment to her Catholic beliefs and in her deep conviction that her fiction should somehow enhance those beliefs, just at a time (the turn of the nineteenth century) when fiction was trying to shake off the shackles of Victorian morals by calling into question bourgeois assumptions. Mrs. Ward (née Josephine Hope) belonged to a well-known Catholic family with a solid intellectual background and had married Cardinal Newman's biographer, Wilfrid Ward, editor of the Dublin Review from 1906 to 1915. She was highly esteemed by a distinguished circle of friends, which numbered G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. H. Huxley and George Wyndham.2 She was not cut off from London literary circles3 and generally her novels met with praise, but undoubtedly the fact of being a militant Catholic impaired in some measure her chance of being established as one of the most interesting women writers of the period. Yet, in her A Poor Scruple (1899), the theme of difficult moral choices arising from the conflict between religious principles and personal inclination is treated in a far more delicate and convincing way than it is in the novel of her namesake and better-known colleague Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Helbeck ofBannisdale (1898). Understandably, though, just at a time when moral standards in matters of sex were being attacked in the name of freedom, her defence of the sanctity of marriage ("she would protest if marriage was spoken of as merely 'the common lot'"4) was bound to make her appear outmoded. 151 ELT 49 : 2 2006 In her case it is probably true what the author of "An Appreciation" prefacing the 1933 edition of three of her novels wrote: "It is the plainest truth to say that the sense of spiritual values has almost entirely vanished from contemporary literature."5 Ward has not been reclaimed from oblivion like so many of her contemporaries, since she is not the sort of social rebel likely to attract the attention of the modern scholar in gender studies. Although most of her novels were written around the turn of the century, she kept herself away from the stream of radical women writers, whether feminists, Decadents or realists. Not that she shunned certain themes, but she treated them more from an intimate , spiritual perspective than from a social one. Commenting upon her novel The Light Behind (1901), her daughter writes: "Human life is like that, and my mother does not try to escape from the very humdrum , sometimes sordid facts of human life and experience into an unreal spiritual world. What she tries to show is that this very world itself with all its mistakes and its sinfulness may be transmuted if the Light Behind of the divine Reality is cast upon it."6 If Ward remained in the shade because she went against the mainstream in the treatment of her subject matter, nevertheless she was well aware of contemporary developments in fictional technique and had given ample thought to the problems posed by novel writing. The year her novel The Job Secretary was published, 1911, falls within a literary period when the most different tendencies coexisted. Popular romances continued to be published by the hundreds together with more innovative fiction. In a few years Dorothy Richardson was to open the way to modernism with the first volume of Pilgrimage (1915), while May Sinclair was already exploring the theme of the woman writer in The Creators (1911) and a few years later would herself search for a more modern fictional language, also pointing to modernism, in Mary Olivier (1919), not to mention of course Virginia Woolf. The purpose of this article is to show a more traditional woman writer than Richardson, Sinclair or Woolf giving voice to her religious ideas rather than revolutionary aesthetic principles. Nonetheless Ward uses the novel to explore new ways of expression, ways that...
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