My dear Mr. Gladstone,—
It was charming of you to write to me,—one of those kindnesses which, apart from all your greatness, win to you the hearts of so many. I am so glad that the eyes are better for a time, and that you have shaken off your influenza.
We have just come back from a delightful seven weeks in Italy, at Rome, Siena and Florence, and I am much rested, though still, I am vexed to say, very lame and something of an invalid. The success of Marcella, however, has been a most pleasant tonic, though I always find the first few weeks after the appearance of a book an agitating and trying time, however smoothly things go! The great publicity which our modern conditions involve seems to wear one’s nerves; and I suppose it is inevitable that women should feel such things more than men, who so often, through the training of school and college and public life, get used to them from their childhood.
Your phrase about “prospective work” gave me real delight. I have been enjoying and pondering over the translations of Horace in the Nineteenth Century. Horace is the one Latin poet whom I know fairly well, and often read, though this year, in Italy, I think I realized the spell of Virgil more than ever before. Will you go on, I wonder, from the love-poems to a gathering from the others? I wanted to claim of you three or four in particular, but as I turn over the pages I see in two or three minutes at least twenty that jostle each other to be named, so it is no good!
Believe me,
Yours most sincerely,
Mary A. Ward.
Marcella, like her two predecessors, first appeared in three-volume form, but Mrs. Ward’s quarrel with the big libraries for starving their subscribers, which had been simmering ever since David Grieve, became far more acute over the new book. She reported to George Smith on May 24 that “Sir Henry Cunningham told us last night that he had made a tremendous protest to Mudie’s against their behaviour in the matter of Marcella—which he seems to have told them he regarded as a fraud on the public, or rather on their subscribers, whom they were bound to supply with new books!” This feud, together with the desire of the American Century Magazine to publish her next novel in serial form, provided it were only half the length of Marcella, induced her to consider seriously the question of writing shorter books. “It would be difficult for me, with my tendency to interminableness,” she admitted to George Smith, “to promise to keep within such limits. However, it might be good for me!” Soon afterwards the decision was made, and with it the knell of the three-volume novel sounded, for other novelists soon followed Mrs. Ward’s example. The resulting brevity of modern novels (always excepting Mr. William de Morgan and Mr. Conrad) is thus largely due to the flaming up of an old quarrel between librarians on the one side and publishers and authors on the other, as it occurred in the case of Mrs. Ward’s Marcella.
The summer of 1894 was a period of comparative physical ease, during which Mrs. Ward found that although she was still unable to walk more than a very little, she could ride an old pony we possessed with much profit and pleasure, of course at a foot pace. Thus she was enabled to explore some of the woods and hill-sides around Stocks which she had never yet visited, a pastime which gave her exquisite delight. But by the following winter both her persistent plagues had reappeared in aggravated form. “My hand is extremely troublesome, alas!” she wrote to her father, “and the internal worry has been worse again lately. It is so trying week after week never to feel well, or like other people! One lives one’s life, but it makes it all more of a struggle. And as there is this organic cause for it, one can only look forward to being sometimes better and less conscious of it than at others, but never to being quite well. However, one needn’t grumble, for I manage to enjoy my life greatly in spite of it, and to fill the days pretty full.” And to her husband, who was away on a lecturing-tour in America, she wrote in February, 1895: “Alas! for my hand. It is more seriously disabled than it has been for months and months, and I really ought to give it a month’s complete rest. If it were not for the Century I would!”
This unusual disablement was due no doubt to the extraordinary concentration of effort which she had just put forth in the writing of her village tale of Bessie Costrell—a tale based on an actual occurrence in the village of Aldbury, the tragic details of which absorbed her so much as to amount almost to possession. She finished it in fifteen days, and gave it to George Smith, who always cherished a special affection for this “grimy little tale,” as Mrs. Ward called it.
When he had brought it out, the world devoured it with enthusiasm—so much so that her true friend and mentor, Henry James, whose opinion she valued more highly than any other, thought fit to address a friendly admonition to her:
‘May 8, 1895. I think the tale very straight-forward and powerful—very direct and vivid, full of the real and the juste. I like your unalembicated rustics—they are a tremendous rest after Hardy’s—and the infallibility of your feeling for village life. Likewise I heartily hope you will labour in this field and farm again. But I won’t pretend to agree with one or two declarations that have been wafted to me to the effect that this little tale is “the best thing you’ve done.” It has even been murmured to me that you think so. This I don’t believe, and at any rate I find, for myself, your best in your dealings with data less simple, on a plan less simple. This means, however, mainly, that I hope you won’t abandon anything that you have shewn you can do, but only go on with this and that—and the other—especially the other!