From 1890 to 1905, Mary Arnold Ward was the best-selling novelist in the English language. As the Edwardian age came to an end, however, she became a target of scorn for modernists such as Virginia Woolf, and today most of her books have fallen out of print. But in her novels we can vividly experience the long transition from Victorian to modern England and see again the high melodrama of science's challenge to Christianity, of political socialism and che social gospel, and of women's suffrage and the First World War. The niece of Matthew Arnold and wife of the art critic of the