Mary Augusta Ward

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.

English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.