The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

BY HER DAUGHTER JANET PENROSE TREVELYAN Author of “A Short History of the Italian People” NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1923
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
TO DOROTHY MARY WARD
MY warmest thanks are due to the many friends who have helped me, directly or indirectly, in the writing of this book, but especially to all those who have sent me the letters they possessed from Mrs. Ward, or who have given me leave to publish their own. Mr. Henry Gladstone kindly looked out for me the letters written by Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone during the Robert Elsmere period; Mrs. Creighton did the same for the long period covered by Mrs. Ward’s correspondence with the Bishop and with herself; Miss Arnold of Fox How sent me many valuable letters belonging to the later years. So with Mrs. A. H. Johnson, Mrs. Conybeare, Mrs. R. Vere O’Brien, Sir Robert Blair, Mr. Leonard Huxley, Mrs. Reginald Smith, Lord Buxton, M. Chevrillon, Miss McKee, Mrs. Turner, Miss Gertrude Wood, and many others, and although the letters may not in all cases have been suitable for publication, they have given me many valuable side-lights on Mrs. Ward’s life and work.
To Mrs. A. H. Johnson my special thanks are due for permission to reproduce her water-colour portrait of Mrs. Ward, and to Mrs. T. H. Green for much help in connexion with the Oxford portion of the book.
No book at all, however, could have been produced, even from the material so generously placed at my disposal, had it not been for the constant collaboration of my father and sister, whose help in sifting great masses of papers and in advising me in all difficulties has been my greatest support throughout this task.
J. P. T.
BERKHAMSTEAD, July, 1923 .

IS the study of heredity a science or a pure romance? For the unlearned at least I like to think it is the latter, since no law that the Professors ever formulated can explain the caprices of each little human soul, bobbing up like a coracle over life’s horizon and bringing with it things gathered at random from an infinitely remote and varying ancestry. It is, I believe, generally known that the subject of this biography was a granddaughter of Arnold of Rugby, and therewith her intellectual ability and the force of her character are thought to be sufficiently explained. But what of her mother, the beautiful Julia Sorell, of whom her sad husband said at her death that she had “the nature of a queen,” ever thwarted and rebuffed by circumstance? What of the strain of Spanish Protestant blood that ran in the veins of the Sorells: for although they were refugees from France after the Edict of Nantes, it is most probable that they came of Spanish origin? What of the strain brought in by the wild and forcible Kemps of Mount Vernon in Tasmania? A daughter of Anthony Fenn Kemp (himself a “character” of a remarkable kind) married William Sorell and so became the mother of Julia and the grandmother of Mary Arnold; but the principal fact that is known of her is that she deserted her three daughters after bringing them to England for their education, went off with an army officer and was hardly heard of more. An ungovernable temper seems to have marked most of this family, and the recollections of her childhood were so terrible to Julia Sorell that she wrote in after years to her husband, “Few families have been blessed with such a home training as yours, and certainly very few in our rank of life have been cursed with such as mine.” Yet although Julia inherited much of this violence and passion, to her own constant misery, she had also “the nature of a queen,” and transmitted it in no small degree to her daughter Mary.