Mrs. Ward's First Novel

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 7295, 4 August 1930, Page 9

Mrs. Ward's First Novel

It was in IS7B that a new editor was appointed for ono of tiro huge wellknown volumes, in which under tho aegis of the John Murray of the day, tho Nineteenth Century was accustomed to 'concentrate its knowledge—classical, historical, and theological—in convenient, if not exactly handy, form. Doctor AYace, now a Canon of Canterbury, was then an indefatigable member of tho Times staff. Yet he undertook this extra work, and carried it bravely through. He camo to Oxford to beat up recruits for Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Biography, a companion volume to that of Classical Biography, and dealing with the first seven centuries of Christianity. Ho had been told that I had been busying myself with early Spain, and he c-ame to me to ask whether I would take the Spanish lives for tho period. . . Tho strange thing was that out of the work which seemed both to myself and others to mark tho abandonment of any foolish hopes of novel-writing I might have cherished as a girl Robert Elsmc-ro should have arisen. For after mv marriage I had made various attempts to writo fiction. They were clearly failures. J.R.G. dealt very faithfully with me on the subject; and I could only conclude that tho instinct to tell stories which had been so strong in mo as a child and girl meant nothing, and was to be suppressed. I did, indeed, write a story for my children, which came out in 1880—Milly and Oily; but that wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives.

And yet I venture to think it was after all, the instinct for “making out,” as the Brontes used to call their own wonderful story-telling passion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me. Those far-off centuries became veritably alive to me. . . I lived, indeed,, in that old Spain, while I. was at work in the Bodleian, and at home. To spend hours and.days over tho signatures of an' obscure Council, identifying -each naine so far a-s the existing materials allowed, and attaching to it' some fragment of human interest, so that gradually something of a picture emerged, as of a thing lost and recovered —dredged up from the deeps of time —that, I think, was tho joy of it all. I sec, in memory, the small Oxford room, as it was on' a winter evening, between nine and midnight, my husband in ono corner preparing his college lectures, or writing a “Saturday” “middle,” my books and I in another; the reading-lamp, always to

me a symbol of peace and ‘'recollection”; the Oxford quiet outside.— From “A "Writer's Recollections,” by Mrs. Humphry Ward.