Mrs Humphry Ward wrote this autobiographical work at the end of her life, battling physical pain, and at sixty-eight “approach[ing] the gates of old age”, as she writes on the first page. It is clear that she is poignantly aware, after three decades of celebrity, that her appeal to a new generation of writers and the intellectual
avant garde(including, for example, her nephew Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf) is now negligible. The outraged footnote on page 8 referring to Lytton Strachey’s reading of her grandfather Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby’s life in
Eminent Victoriansevidences the chasm between her late Victorian and Edwardian critical milieu and that of literary Modernism.
The initial tone of the book is of baffled assertion, accumulating rhetorical questions and
2274 words
Citation: Boughton, Gillian. "A Writer's Recollections". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 March 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6912, accessed 22 November 2024.]
