More on Josephine Ward: Elizabeth Huddleston's Project

I do believe Josephine Ward's time for revival and reevaluation has come! (Here's some detail about the books she wrote.)

From the University of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center:

Elizabeth Huddleston is head of research and publications at the National Institute for Newman Studies and associate editor of the Newman Studies Journal. She also teaches in the Department of Catholic Studies at Duquesne University. In 2024, she received a Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center to carry out archival research at Notre Dame in support of her project, “‘A Story of Well-Defined Purpose’: Josephine Hope-Scott Ward’s Social Criticism of Modernism.” Shane Ulbrich corresponded with Huddleston following her visit in April to the Notre Dame Archives.

Huddleston is focused on the Modernist Crisis and what Ward can teach us about it:

The Modernist Controversy has often been studied through the lens of its key figures—Tyrrell, Loisy, Hébert, Houtin, Sabatier, von Hügel, Bremond, to name a few—and their anti-modernist counterparts—Garrigou Lagrange, Merry del Val, Pius X, etc. What can be lost in only viewing the crisis through these polarized and zoomed-in lenses is a sense of how the crisis spilled into the lives of others not at the epicenter. Wilfrid and Josephine were conversant with tenets of both modernism and anti-modernism. Of course they did not want to be censored or condemned, but they also felt that the church was lacking in her relationship with the modern world. Their writings, both personal and published, reflect the tumult felt within the Catholic landscape of the era. While it is important to study the central figures and tenets of movements and crises, it is also important to take a step back and try to view the ripple effects of the crisis to the wider church. The correspondence and writings of Josephine Ward help us gain a better understanding of these currents.

Please read the rest there . . .

Years ago (pre-blog) I read Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis by Marvin O'Connell. One reason I've been interested in the subject is of course the effect on Cardinal Newman's reputation at the time. You may be sure that I'll be following this project with great interest! It especially makes me hope that Out of Due Time, the novel Huddleston mentions, might be published soon.

Book Review: "Tudor Sunset" by Mrs. Wilfrid (Josephine) Ward

This book begins and ends with death: the future Saint John Rigby is hanged, drawn, and quartered at St. Thomas Waterings (on the way to Canterbury) on June 21, 1600 and Queen Elizabeth I dies in her bed on March 24, 1603. With a title like Tudor Sunset, I don't think I'm spoiling the plot by telling you that: the sun sets on the Tudor dynasty when she dies.

It's what Josephine Ward does between these two deaths that make a novel a tense and suspenseful historical tale, as the fictional couple at the center of tale, Margaret (Meg) Scrope and Captain Richard Whitlock do their best to survive the last two years and three months of Elizabeth's reign. Especially since Meg is a recusant Catholic lady-in-waiting and friend of Anne (Dacre) Howard, Lady Arundell, the widow of martyred-in-chains Saint Philip Howard, and she and Whitlock frequent the bookstore of future Blessed James Duckett (also a martyr).

Each book and each chapter--numbered, not titled--brings another brush with danger, near escape, temptation or trap, and the reader becomes even more watchful than the characters.

Following a classic historical fiction method, Ward brings real historical characters into the story: not just Queen Elizabeth I, but Richard Topcliffe, William Byrd, Father John Gerard, SJ, Lady Arundell, the two martyrs already mentioned, etc., and one lady in particular, Luisa de Carvajal.

In the appendix with notes on her sources, Ward admits that she has brought Luisa de Carvajal to England earlier than records indicate she actually came. She needs her there for a crucial plot development and resolution. 

This may be a deal breaker for some readers and I'm not completely happy with her decision either. One result of this change in time line is that Ward depicts the "last supper" of Saint John Roberts, OSB and Blessed Thomas Somers the night before their executions at Tyburn arranged by Luisa de Carvajal on December 9, 1610 in Newgate Prison as being arranged instead for Blesseds Francis Page, SJ, Robert Watkinson, and Venerable Thomas Tichborne the night before their executions on April 20, 1602!

I looked at a couple of historical fiction writing guides and they commented that the author may use the excuse of a gap in the historical record to deviate from the timeline. For example Jane Friedman comments:

Rather than worrying about never, ever deviating from history, I advise establishing your own set of rules for when to bend history or not. That way, you’ll be able to make fair and consistent decisions and achieve the kind of balance most readers are looking for. Here are some tips that might help:

• There is a difference between altering verifiable facts and filling in the gaps. History is full of mysteries, unanswered questions, and gaps in the record. If what really happened can’t be verified, you have much more freedom to play around with history. . . .

• If a historical figure isn’t well known and not a lot has been written about them, you have more room for maneuver than you do if their life has been exhaustively documented. But, if you’re going to make something up, make sure it’s consistent with what you otherwise know about the character, including how they behaved, their interests, and what their values were.

So I'll just leave that there for your consideration; the scenes depicting the interactions between the priests and the laywomen, including the tragic figure of Anne Bellamy, who betrayed Saint Robert Southwell after horrible abuse and manipulation by Topcliffe (see the third paragraph on this page for details) are filled with wonderful detail and verisimilitude (?). Ward adds details to their conversations like the stories of Jane Wiseman, a recusant sentenced to the same fate as Saint Margaret Clitherow, of being pressed (literally) for information--which fits the timeline of the novel--and the executions of Blesseds John Thules and Richard Wrenno (Wrenno the Weaver)--which do not! (they were executed in Lancaster in 1616)--so while it's a beautiful scene and fulfills Ward's purposes of using the occasion to present vivid historical detail about how Catholics suffered in different ways in that era, it still troubles me a bit . . .

After a detour through Newgate and a sojourn at the Recusant Sawston Hall in Cambridgeshire with Lady Huddleston and William Byrd (his Mass for Three Voices is sung there), the scene returns to Court after the execution of the Earl of Essex on February 25, 1601. 

There's a different tension in the last part of the book as the two fictional characters wait out the last months of Elizabeth I's life. Meg and Lady Southwell--I presume this is the Lady Elizabeth (Howard) Southwell who went on to serve James I's Queen Anne of Denmark--serve the queen through her last decline: on the floor, standing up for hours, finally in bed, pressed to prepare for death by Archbishop Whitgift and the succession by Lord Cecil . . . 

The last words of the book are: 

It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.

Finally, I must comment on Josephine Ward's extensive preparation for this book, documented in her "Rough Notes on some of the Books Consulted" in the Appendix. The notes are not rough at all as she evaluates the literature available to her at the time and displays her critical judgment of the authors' intentions and methods. She read these works not just for the details about the sufferings of Catholics during Elizabeth I's reign but to help her prepare for the really great challenge of the novel: How to depict Queen Elizabeth I in the waning years of her reign. 

In the note Ward wrote "To Alfred Noyes" at the beginning of the book, she offers some insights into how she framed this depiction:

Does not tyranny provoke falsehood? Was ever a father so tyrannous as Henry VIII? Has it every been understood how his tyranny affected Elizabeth? Mary has been more pitied [?], and perhaps rightly, but the fact that the vices of the triumphant Elizabeth can be traced to her childhood is in itself a tragedy.

If the heart of Mary's mother was broken, the mother of Elizabeth was beheaded. The alternations of their fate were extreme, for first one and the other daughter was proclaimed illegitimate; first one and then the other and then both had the prospect of wearing the crown. The story of their childhood shows how they were conscious that they were utterly helpless and without defense against their father. On Elizabeth the effect was formative and repulsive. It seems to me that she admired the monster as heathens have admired inhuman gods. . . . Was ever child more demoralised by a bad father? (p. xi)

For all my qualms about the Luisa de Carvajal timeline manipulations, this was a marvelous reading experience and I recommend the novel highly.

Ward placed the "Epilogue at the Presentation before Queen Elizabeth of Ben Jonson's "Every Man Out of His Humor" (1599) as the frontispiece of the book (I have the Reprinted edition of December 1932 from Longmans, Green and Co.):

O heaven, that She, whose presence hath effected
This change in me, may suffer most late change
In her admired and happy government:
May still this Island be call'd Fortunate,
And rugged Treason tremble at the sound,
When Fame shall speak it with an emphasis.
Let foreign polity be dull as lead,
And pale Invasion come with half a heart,
When he but looks upon her blessed soil.
The throat of War be stopt within her land,
And turtle-footed Peace dance fairy rings
About her court; where never may there come
Suspect or danger, but all trust and safety.
Let Flattery be dumb, and Envy blind
In her dread presence; Death himself admire her;
And may her virtues make him to forget
The use of his inevitable hand.
Fly from her, Age; sleep, Time, before her throne;
Our strongest wall falls down, when she is gone.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Elizabeth I, painted around 1610, during the first revival of interest in her reign. Time sleeps on her right and Death looks over her left shoulder; two putti hold the crown above her head.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Portrait thought to Elizabeth Southwell as a widow in 1600

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

Book Review: Josephine Ward's "One Poor Scruple"

I could not put this book down Saturday afternoon. I bought it at Eighth Day Books that morning, ran a couple of errands after that, and started reading it at lunch. Finished it at 10:45 p.m., well past my usual bedtime! It was compelling, dramatic, and insightful. The blurb almost invites comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, so I'm going to follow that lead to some extent in my review.

The publisher's blurb:

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world.

First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

Since this is novel about a family, the relationships, good and bad, between the characters are consequential for the plot as Ward has woven it. One of the most crucial of these relationships is the one between the protagonist, the childless widow Marge Riversdale and her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law. Her late husband George, whom his mother idolizes, treated Marge badly (details about infidelity, lavish spending--leaving her in debt--abandonment, and a mysterious death are only hinted at), yet his mother blames Marge for not reforming him. Because of this divide, which even the regard Marge feels for her father-in-law cannot mend, she does not have the moral support she needs as she has entered London society. Even a visit to the Riversdale's home in Lancashire, where she intends to go to Confession after some delay, can't provide her refuge because of this rift (on both sides, of course).

I wish there'd been a family tree: these relationships are a little confusing to me! 

It also must be said that the older Mrs. Riversdale, Helen, has no great sympathy for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, Janet, nee Harding, a convert from Broad Church Anglicanism to Catholicism through Saint John Henry Newman! Helen doesn't trust Newman as a Confessor to Janet because he'd been an Anglican too; and she doesn't like it that Janet is reading George Eliot's Adam Bede, details recounted in the chapter devoted to Janet and her daughter Hilda, who will be coming at the Hunt Ball (that must be delayed!). But Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, also a widow, doesn't figure much in the story, except for sending Hilda first to the family home and then to London, and keeping her there in dangers unbeknownst to her mother.

You can see some parallels to the Flyte family divisions in Brideshead Revisited, I think. One huge difference between the two novels is there is little or no humor--certainly no characters like Rex Mottram to provide ridiculous comic relief. The diversions of the world, the desire for Catholics to fit in British society after centuries of recusancy are dangers to the Faith for the characters in both novels. 

The big issue in One Poor Scruple, as in Brideshead Revisited, is that Marge (like Lord Marchmain and Julia), needs to repent and reconcile with Jesus and the Catholic Church. The problem for Marge is that she contemplates marriage to a divorced Lord Bellasis and that her London friends (?), most notably Lady Cecilia Rupert and Laura, Mrs. Hurstmonceaux plot to enmesh Marge: Laura wants her to marry Lord Bellasis, partly to demonstrate her power and partly to force Marge out the "superstition" of Catholicism, while Lady Cecilia wants Lord Bellasis for herself. Marge is no match for these two plotters, but fortunately, her sister-in-law Mary is (no spoiler!)

It's the web of gossip and double-timing that Laura and Cecilia weave that ensnares Marge, Hilda, Marmaduke Lemerchant, and even Mark Fieldes in great moral dangers. Cecilia's efforts to use Hilda, in London for her first Season, are particularly malign. One thing that Marge vows is to never see Laura Hurstmonceaux again, because she's a "heap" of trouble. The three men, Lord Bellasis, Marmaduke, and Mark, are also wrapped up in these plots as Laura and Cecilia find them useful.

Also unlike Evelyn Waugh's novel, this novel has an omniscient narrator, who knows the characters' thoughts and even interprets, for example, Hilda's efforts to write home to her mother, editing her letters as she writes them.

The denouement in One Poor Scruple is more realistic than Lord Marchmain's signed acquiescence to the Sacrament of Extreme Unction because it relies more on Marge's childhood devotion to Our Lady and her battles with her conscience before agreeing to marry Lord Bellasis. It is not quite as miraculous as that Sign of the Cross, but it is spiritually dramatic. And the aftermath of that intervention is congruent with Marge's character throughout the novel: she still struggles to confess her sins.

As Thomas Woodman comments in his Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature, "No plot summary can do justice to the impressive psychological realism and restraint of this work." (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022 Second Edition, p. 25). Ward also excels in the physical descriptions of these people, their looks and mannerisms: they are embodied in my imagination.

I hope the editors of the Catholic Women Writers series, Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, plan to publish more of Josephine Ward's fiction. She is an excellent novelist, based on this example, sympathetic and yet realistic about her characters, and with an eye for social satire combined with excellent plotting (not like Laura or Cecilia, though!).

The title comes from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 in a speech of Portia's at the trial of the bond:

Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much (2275)
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

Highly recommended.