Behind her times

the long version

"From 1890 to 1905, Mary Arnold Ward was the best-selling novelist in the English language. As the Edwardian age came to an end, however, she became a target of scorn for modernists such as Virginia Woolf, and today most of her books have fallen out of print. But in her novels we can vividly experience the long transition from Victorian to modern England and see again the high melodrama of science's challenge to Christianity, of political socialism and the social gospel, and of women's suffrage and the First World War." "In this new critical examination, Judith Wilt sees Ward as being "behind her times" in two senses - in her tireless defense of her evolving era's achievements and intentions, but also in her wariness of the advance of time and of the violence of change. Writing during what she recognized as a period of transition, she dramatized both a welcome of and a resistance to modernity, seeing the social developments of the day as temporary structures, subject to transition themselves."--Jacket.