[In the following excerpt, Sait discusses Ward's works of the First World War era.]

Undoubtedly the Great War was recognised as the Great Subject by commercially minded writers of fiction and non-fiction. However, few writers achieved any major work in the battlefield and much of the non-combatant literature which did appear has suffered from critical neglect. Neither of the two major critical studies of literature in the Great War, Bernard Bergonzi's Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory refers to Mrs. Humphry Ward. This neglect is justified to a certain extent in that both male writers are concerned only with male writers. However, their concern with the literature which emanated from the battlefields reaches some generalisations which reflect on Mrs. Ward's own work. Bergonzi asserts: 'The dominant movement in the literature of the Great War...