Preview: Introducing Mrs. Wilfrid (Josephine) Ward on the Son Rise Morning Show

Anna Mitchell asked me if I'd like to comment on the life and career of Mrs. Wilfrid Ward (nee Josephine Mary Hope-Scott) during my usual Son Rise Morning Show spot on Monday, July 1. She had read a chapter about her in a book from Word on Fire, Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know, edited by Haley Stewart, which I have not read. 

But I have read about Josephine Ward from other sources and have read two of her novels, so I said yes, I'd be happy to. So, Anna will bring what she knows about Josephine and I'll bring what I know about Josephine to our discussion.

The SRMS team will take the week of July 8 through 12 off (although Anna Mitchell has prepared many interviews to air during that week).

We will talk about the two novels by Josephine Ward I have read (One Poor Scruple and Tudor Sunset) during my resumed Monday segment on July 15!

BTW: for those of you few (!) who haven't followed this blog from the beginning, I started appearing on the Son Rise Morning Show in 2010, soon after Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation was published. I even visited Sacred Heart Radio's former location during a business trip with my late husband Mark in 2012, driving from Columbus to Cincinnati, and meeting Anna and Matt Swaim.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

Josephine Ward (May 18, 1864 – November 20, 1932) was the daughter of one of Saint John Henry Newman's good friends, James Hope-Scott (please note the "-Scott") and his second wife Lady Victoria Alexandrina Fitzalan-Howard, a daughter of the 14th Duke of Norfolk, Henry Granville Fitzalan-Howard, the leading Catholic peer and Earl Marshall of England. By his first wife, Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott's granddaughter, James Hope inherited Abbotsford House in 1853 and added the "-Scott' to his name.

After her parents' deaths, she and her brother James went to live with her maternal grandmother, Augusta Minna Howard, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk at Arundel Castle in West Sussex.

I drop all these names and titles because they demonstrate the rich Catholic background Josephine Mary had--both "Old" Catholic and "New" Catholic, with ties to the recently Emancipated Recusants and the Oxford Movement/Tractarian converts. 

She lived in two historically storied homes: Abbotsford, where she describes how she used play "as a child amidst [her great-grandfathers's] coats of mail in Hall . . . and [pass] between them shivering with terror on my lonely way to bed" in her note to Alfred Noyes in her last novel, Tudor Sunset. Reflecting on her ancestor's writing career, she says as child she didn't really think about attempting "to write an historical novel!", and yet in 1932, she published one about the last years of Queen Elizabeth I.

Then she lived in Arundel Castle, associated with two Catholic martyrs, Saint Philip Howard--where his then-Venerable/Beatified remains were entombed in the Fitzalan Chapel--and Blessed William Howard. So she had those deep ties to the past and the nine pages of books consulted at the end of Tudor Sunset demonstrates how she had studied her family's Catholic heritage.

In 1887, she married Wilfrid Philip Ward, the son of another important Oxford Movement convert, William George Ward. Wilfrid wrote biographies of his father (two separate titles), of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, and of Cardinal Newman (two volumes). She wrote novels, One Poor Scruple, Out of Due Time and The Job Secretary, for example. Wilfrid and Josephine knew all the great Catholics of that era, from Newman to Manning and Noyes to Belloc, not to mention other literary figures like Chesterton and Tennyson! Can you imagine a dinner party at their home?

To appreciate how close she and Wilfrid were to Cardinal Newman, see the letters she wrote and he wrote to Newman, announcing their engagement to be married in 1887!

Furthermore, Josephine and Wilfrid's daughter Maisie Ward married Frank Sheed in 1926, and they founded Sheed & Ward publishers, which republished some of Josephine's novels in 1933, including One Poor Scruple. Josephine assisted Maisie and Frank financially to found the company. Maisie went on to write many great books too, including biographies of her parents, Chesterton, Caryll Houselander, and Cardinal Newman--and one of my favorites, Saints Who Made History: The First Five Centuries!

Wilfrid died in 1916, Josephine in 1932; she was buried on the Isle of Wight.

The editors of the Catholic Women Writers series, Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson have included One Poor Scruple among the first works published in the series by the Catholic University of America Press, which I reviewed here.

In an article published in the Newman Review, they wrote of Josephine:

One of the Revival’s greatest literary treasures is Josephine Ward, who lived between 1864–1932. . . . In their writing, Josephine and Wilfrid were both concerned with the question of how to realize the fullness of human character in prose: What is a person? How is character formed? Josephine wrote in the Dublin Review that “the greatest drama is the unfolding of the action of the will as it adheres to or thwarts the Divine purpose.” But as a life-long friend of Newman’s, she was also steeped in his ideas about conscience and the formation of moral character, as well as about the importance of doctrine for both. Another central concern of Josephine’s—as topical today as it was then—was how to enable her children to participate in the best of public, intellectual, and cultural life, without exposing them over-much to the influence of institutions that remained fundamentally opposed to Catholic belief and practice.

I'm excited about this discussion on Monday and am grateful to Anna Mitchell for suggesting it.

Image Source (Public Domain): Portrait by Thomas Lawrence, c. 1820s