[In the following excerpt, Wagenknecht characterizes Ward's works as typifying conservative Victorian tastes in literature.]

Life is always much less systematic than histories of literature; and there are currents and counter-currents in every period. During the latter end of Victoria's reign in England some writers were already giving their allegiance to the ideals of the age that was to come, while others, not necessarily inferior to them, were still finding their creative inspiration in the old patterns.…

Mrs. Humphry Ward is the first [among the literary conservatives of the late Victorian era]. It is the fashion nowadays to see her in a light very similar to that in which Lytton Strachey placed her grandfather, Thomas Arnold. She is the perfect symbol of everything that was "stuffy" in Victorianism. She has been caricatured by H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett [in The Sea Lady and The Book of Carlotta...