When the book at length appeared, in September, 1896, Mrs. Ward was afraid that it would hardly float under the weight of its politics, but this was not so, for it sold 15,000 copies within a week, and never, perhaps, were the reviews more cordial. The relation between the two women, Letty and Marcella, was universally felt to be one of the best things she had ever attempted, while the greater compression of the book was accepted with a sigh of relief.
“Mrs. Ward is wisely content,” said the Leeds Mercury, “to take more for granted, and with true artistic instinct to leave room for the play of her readers’ imagination; we are saved, consequently, tedious details, and that over-elaboration of incident, if not of plot, which was one of the most conspicuous blemishes in her previous works. She is beginning also to believe that brevity is the soul of art, as well as of wit, and therefore, without any sacrifice of the essential points in her narrative, she has found it possible—by discarding padding—to state all that she has to tell about ‘Sir George Tressady’ in considerably less than six hundred pages, instead of making her old, unconscionable demand for at least a thousand. It would not be true to say that Mrs. Ward has lost all her literary mannerisms, or even affectations, but they are falling rapidly into the background—one proof amongst many, that she is mastering at length the secret of that blended strength and simplicity of style which all writers envy, but to which few attain.”
Two opinions, expressed by such opposite critics as Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, may be of interest to this day:
“The story is very touching,” wrote Mrs. Webb, “and you have an indescribable power of making your readers sympathize with all your characters, even with Letty and her unlovely mother-in-law. Of course, as a strict utilitarian, I am inclined to estimate the book more in its character of treatise than as a novel. From this point of view it is the most useful bit of work that has been done for many a long day. You have managed to give the arguments for and against factory legislation and a fixed standard of life with admirable lucidity and picturesqueness—in a way that will make them comprehensible to the ordinary person without any technical knowledge. I especially admire your real intellectual impartiality and capacity to give the best arguments on both sides, though naturally I am glad to see that your sympathy is on the whole with us on those questions.
“Pray accept my thanks from a public as well as a personal point of view for the gift of the book to the world and to myself.”
And Mr. Kipling wrote:
“DEAR MRS. WARD,—
I am delighted to have Sir George Tressady from your hand. I have followed him from month to month with the liveliest wonder as to how the inevitable smash in his affairs was to fall, and now that I have read the tale as a whole I see that of course there was but one way. Like all human books it has the unpleasant power of making you think and bother as one only bothers over real folk: but how splendidly you have done the lighter relief-work! ‘Fifteen out of a possible twelve’ has already been adopted as a household word by us, who have two babies.
“It will always be one of the darkest mysteries to me that any human being can make a beginning, end and middle to a really truly long story. I can think them by scores, but I have not the hand to work out the full frieze. It is just the difference between the deep-sea steamer with twelve hundred people aboard, besides the poor beggars sweating and scorching in the stoke-hold, and the coastwise boat with a mixed cargo of ‘notions.’ And so, when the liner sees fit to salute the coaster in passing, that small boat is mightily encouraged.”
But the writing of Sir George Tressady had been carried out against greater handicaps of physical suffering and nervous strain than perhaps any of Mrs. Ward’s previous books. She had agreed to let the Century Magazine publish it serially from November 1, 1895, and had fully intended to have it finished, at any rate in provisional form, by that date. But ill-health and her absorption in the affairs of University Hall retarded its progress, so that when November came there were still eight or nine chapters to write, and those the most difficult and critical of the book. The Century cabled for more copy, but at the same time Mrs. Ward fell a victim to “a new ailment,” as she wrote to her father, “and what with that and the perpetual struggle with the hand, which will not let me write lying down, I hardly know how to get through sometimes.” She was advised to have what the surgeons assured her would be a “slight” operation, but put it off until after a Christmas month at Stocks, during which she devoted herself, crippled as she was, to the writing of Tressady. Hardly would she have “got through” these weeks at all—for by now the demands on her time, the letters and requests to speak were endless—had she not discovered during this winter a secretary, Miss Bessie Churcher, whose wonderful qualities made her not only Mrs. Ward’s closest helper and friend during the whole remainder of her life, but have impressed themselves for good, through many years’ devotion, on the public work of London.