Robert Elsmere by Mary Augusta Ward

First published: 1888

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: 1882-1886

Locale: Westmoreland, Oxford, Surrey, and London, England

Principal characters

• Robert Elsmere, a clergyman
• Catherine Leyburn Elsmere, his wife
• Rose Leyburn, her sister
• Edward Langham, Robert’s Oxford tutor
• Henry Grey, an Oxford don
• Squire Wendover, a landowner and scholar
• Hugh Flaxman, Rose’s suitor

The Story:

Catherine, Agnes, and Rose Leyburn, sisters living in a remote valley in Westmoreland, in England’s Lake District, learn of the imminent arrival of Robert Elsmere, a young Anglican clergyman coming to visit his uncle and aunt before he assumes responsibility for a parish in southern England. Once he meets the Leyburns, Robert is quickly drawn to Catherine’s seriousness and spirituality. Catherine resists her own attraction to Robert, having promised her deceased father to remain in Westmoreland and devote herself to her mother and sisters and to preserving the centrality of religion in their lives. Rose, a talented violinist, is already trying to break away to study music, but Catherine thinks music frivolous. Catherine is grateful when Robert persuades her to treat Rose’s interests more sympathetically, but she feels she has to break off her relationship with him. She tells him that she cannot desert her family and had resolves to continue her life in Westmoreland. Her resolve is shaken when her mother, learning of her interest in Robert from Robert’s matchmaking aunt, assures Catherine that she would be pleased with the match. Catherine feels her life’s purpose is undermined. On a stormy evening, she attends the deathbed of a woman who bore an illegitimate child. Robert follows her and persuades her to marry him, promising that together they can live a life dedicated to God and to helping others.

This promise bears out as the Elsmeres enthusiastically embark on their work with Robert’s new parishioners at Murewell, in Surrey. At the end of their first year, though, Catherine is troubled by Rose’s interest in the disillusioned Edward Langham, a man with no sympathy for religious belief. Langham and Rose hope briefly that she might rouse him from the despair of his solitary, empty life, but Langham, believing himself unable to change, departs suddenly. Rose is embarrassed to have shown her interest in him.

A more serious crisis develops when Robert becomes friendly with Squire Wendover, the local large landowner and a scholar famous for his skeptical views of Christianity. Robert pursues his own study of history with the help of Wendover’s library, and together they discuss nineteenth century German philosophy and historical research. Although Robert hopes his faith will be strong enough to withstand modern scholarship, he concludes that it compellingly refutes traditional beliefs in miracles, the Resurrection, and the divinity of Christ. He maintains a deep religious commitment to Jesus’ life as an ethical model, but the loss of other orthodox beliefs is wrenchingly painful. Some other Anglican clergymen are able to doubt privately yet continue their lives of church service, but Robert knows this will be impossible for him. Not only does he have to end his ministry in Murewell, he is terrified that his changed faith will mean an irreparable breach with Catherine.

Robert goes to Oxford to ask the advice of Mr. Grey, an Oxford don he admired when he was a student, and someone whose religious beliefs are close to those Robert now holds. The understanding Grey advises Robert immediately to seek Catherine’s help. When he does so, Catherine almost breaks down: Robert’s loss of faith is incomprehensible to her. She tells Robert that she will continue to love and support him, but the distance between them grows.

In London, Robert finds a socially useful role in the slums of the East End. Here, he lectures and discusses his new beliefs with skeptical but interested artisans, with whom he founds a new church, the New Brotherhood of Christ. Because Catherine refuses any contact with this work, the rift between them widens and their unhappiness in their life together intensifies.

Meanwhile, musical study in Germany develops Rose’s artistry. Taken up by socially prominent friends of Squire Wendover, she attracts the interest of the aristocratic Hugh Flaxman. Flaxman becomes fascinated with Robert’s East End projects and gives financial support to the New Brotherhood. During this time, Rose is also seeing Langham, who is unable to stay away from her. Once again their relationship deepens and they declare their love, but the next morning, Langham writes Rose that his nature makes marriage impossible. Rose decides that her love for him was an immature romantic illusion. Her sense of propriety makes it difficult for her to accept a new lover, however, and when Flaxman, after waiting patiently, proposes to her, she asks him to wait six more months.

The Elsmeres’ marriage regains its strength after advances from the amoral Madame de Netteville make Robert face his estrangement from Catherine and after Flaxman gives Catherine a moving account of Robert’s experience with the New Brotherhood. Catherine is finally able to agree that Robert’s beliefs, though she thinks them wrong, are still fundamentally religious. Robert’s health, never strong, breaks under the strain of his work. Told that he will soon die from tuberculosis, he and Catherine go to Algiers in the hope that warm air will prolong his life. Rose and Flaxman join them and are there when he dies. After Rose and Flaxman marry, Catherine continues to attend an Anglican church but also works for the New Brotherhood, which thrives.

Bibliography

Boughton, Gillian E. “Dr. Arnold’s Granddaughter: Mary Augusta Ward.” In The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Discusses Ward’s childhood writings and how they led to her adult work. Provides biographical details about Ward.

Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Colby, who sees Ward as a flawed novelist but a reliable documentarian of her times, discusses at some length Robert Elsmere and the reasons for its popularity.

Lewis, Linda M. “Mary Augusta Ward’s Literary Portraits of the Artist as Medusa.” In Women’s Literary Creativity and the Female Body, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Donna Decker Schuster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Analyzes the significance of gender in Ward’s writing, devoting several pages to a discussion of Robert Elsmere.

Peterson, William S. Victorian Heretic: Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Robert Elsmere.” Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1976. Situates Robert Elsmere in its biographical, literary, and historical contexts and describes its publication history and critical reception.

Smith, Esther Marian Greenwell. Mrs. Humphry Ward. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Reviews changes in Ward’s reputation as a novelist, summarizes comments by other late twentieth century critics, and argues for the continuing relevance of Robert Elsmere’s religious issues.

Sutherland, John. Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. One of the best available biographies of Ward, a sympathetic account of her life and a richly detailed analysis of the changing social contexts in which she wrote. Describes her struggles with the composition and revision of Robert Elsmere, which Sutherland thinks is not her best novel.

Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth. Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Describes how the three women authors rejected the aestheticism and modernism of the late Victorian era in favor of a more practical, mundane literature. Focuses on the authors’ use of housekeeping as a symbol for the individual’s responsibility in both the domestic and the public spheres.

Wilt, Judith. “Robert Elsmere: The Englishman as Heretic.” In Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Examination of Ward’s novels, demonstrating how her works provide a transition between the Romantic literature of Victorian England and the latter realism of the modernist movement.

Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York: Garland, 1977. The introductory chapter of this study usefully summarizes religious developments in England since the Reformation. The chapter on Ward includes an extensive description of Robert Elsmere, which Wolff, a historian, calls “the climactic Victorian novel of religious doubt.”