Mrs. Humphry Ward

Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920), who published as Mrs. Humphry Ward, was a British novelist and social reformer born in Hobart, Tasmania, into the distinguished Arnold family: she was a granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and a niece of the poet Matthew Arnold. She is best known for Robert Elsmere, a runaway bestseller of 1888 that captured the era's religious anxieties. Beyond fiction she founded settlement work in London and led the campaign against women's suffrage, a stance that complicated her later reputation.