Mary Augusta Ward

"English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century."

"It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership."

"For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures."

"I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again."

"The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope."

"In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction."