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Helbeck of Bannisdale
Mary Augusta Ward (nee Arnold; June 11, 1851 - March 26, 1920), was a British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs Humphry Ward.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1898
About the author
Mrs. Humphry Ward
218 books14 followersMary Augusta Ward CBE (nee Arnold) was an English novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs. Humphry Ward. Mary Augusta Arnold was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists. Mary was the daughter of Tom Arnold, a professor of literature, and Julia Sorrell. Her uncle was the poet Matthew Arnold and her grandfather Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School. Her sister Julia married Leonard Huxley, the son of Thomas Huxley, and their sons were Julian and Aldous Huxley. The Arnolds and the Huxleys were an important influence on British intellectual life.Mary's father Tom Arnold was appointed inspector of schools in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and commenced his role on 15 January 1850. Tom Arnold was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 12 January 1856, which made him so unpopular in his job (and with his wife) that he resigned and left for England with his family in July 1856. Mary Arnold had her fifth birthday the month before they left, and had no further connection with Tasmania. Tom Arnold was ratified as chair of English literature at the contemplated Catholic university, Dublin, after some delay. Mary Augusta Ward died in London, England, and was interred at Aldbury in Hertfordshire, near her beloved country home Stocks.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 14, 2021
Sometimes reading a novel by an author you haven’t encountered before can afford a double pleasure: in discovering the novel and discovering the author. ‘Mrs Humphrey Ward’— a.k.a. Mary Augusta Ward (1851-1920)— was a social reformer and pioneer of women’s university education, a niece of Matthew Arnold and an aunt of Aldous Huxley. She has strong claims to historical interest independently from her career as a novelist, yet Helbeck of Bannisdale also shows her to have been a writer of real distinction.
Ward won considerable acclaim in her lifetime as a novelist. Her breakthrough work, Robert Elsmere (1888) was an international bestseller (Henry James called its appearance a ’momentous public event’). Yet Ward is now almost entirely forgotten as an author, at least outside academia. At the time of writing, Helbeck has only 34 ratings on Goodreads and 8 text reviews—distinctly meagre for a work accurately described in one of those reviews as ‘Villette meets Brideshead Revisited in the style of Mrs Gaskell with an added dash of Wuthering Heights’.
The thematic core of Helbeck is a classic late-Victorian one, which also animates George Gissing’s Born in Exile, published six years earlier: the tension between a religious and a modern scientific world view. Where Gissing’s novel is unrelentingly ‘modern’ in setting and style, however, Ward’s is more eclectic, dipping back into older modes. There is a faint aura of the Gothic in the description of the semi-decrepit family seat of the title character, Alan Helbeck, a Catholic landowner of ancient family and ascetic habits, mouldering away in family memories of martyrdoms past and seemingly destined to be the last of his line.
The plot of the novel—such as it is—concerns the tortured relationship that develops between Helbeck and the young stepdaughter of his sister, whom the latter brings with her when she returns to her family home after the death of her husband. The girl, Laura Fountain, has been raised as a religious sceptic by her father, a Cambridge science don (like Ward’s brother-in-law, Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’), and she is initially repelled by the heady atmosphere of Catholic ritual that greets her at Bannisdale. That she and Helbeck, initially hostile, will find themselves fatally attracted across the religious tracks is so predictable that I won’t even bother hiding it as a spoiler, but where Ward goes with the story after that is much more unexpected. Not only are both characters torn, but, strikingly, the author is as well. Shortly after finishing the novel, Ward wrote ‘I have alternately felt with Helbeck & with Laura, and have loved them both’, and I felt the same oscillation of feeling as I read. That’s an achievement in itself, in a novel that dramatizes an intellectual and cultural and ideological division. Novels of this kind have usually decided on a ‘winner’ behind the scenes, however much they try to voice both sides of an issue. Ward also makes a brilliant and, in Victorian terms, counterintuitive move by having the female character represent modernism and the male character tradition.
There are various criticisms I could make of this novel. Laura and Helbeck are both superbly well realized, but most of the other characters in the novel remain in their shadow. Attempts to wheel in characters to represent other religious positions—the hardcore, Papist-loathing Methodism of Laura’s yeoman-farmer cousins; the tolerant, open-minded intellectual Anglicanism of her father’s Cambridge colleague Dr Friedland—feel a little forced. There was one episode, as well, which I found rather off-putting, involving an orphan girl as virtue-signalling accessory....but I guess that is the Victorian novel for you. The past has a different moral landscape.
On the plus side, there’s more than enough in this novel to outweigh these failings: some truly beautiful descriptive writing, worthy of Hardy, evoking the Westmoreland countryside where Ward largely grew up; the tragic, fate-driven sensibility that permeates the narrative, again reminiscent of Hardy; and the stunning imaginative feat of exploring two such different mindsets and feeling-sets as Laura’s and Helbeck’s, with such moving empathy for both. The quality of the writing is excellent overall, and I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to compare Ward with a canonical figure like Elizabeth Gaskell. I’m grateful to the publisher, Victorian Secrets, for unearthing this genuine dark gem.
Ward won considerable acclaim in her lifetime as a novelist. Her breakthrough work, Robert Elsmere (1888) was an international bestseller (Henry James called its appearance a ’momentous public event’). Yet Ward is now almost entirely forgotten as an author, at least outside academia. At the time of writing, Helbeck has only 34 ratings on Goodreads and 8 text reviews—distinctly meagre for a work accurately described in one of those reviews as ‘Villette meets Brideshead Revisited in the style of Mrs Gaskell with an added dash of Wuthering Heights’.
The thematic core of Helbeck is a classic late-Victorian one, which also animates George Gissing’s Born in Exile, published six years earlier: the tension between a religious and a modern scientific world view. Where Gissing’s novel is unrelentingly ‘modern’ in setting and style, however, Ward’s is more eclectic, dipping back into older modes. There is a faint aura of the Gothic in the description of the semi-decrepit family seat of the title character, Alan Helbeck, a Catholic landowner of ancient family and ascetic habits, mouldering away in family memories of martyrdoms past and seemingly destined to be the last of his line.
The plot of the novel—such as it is—concerns the tortured relationship that develops between Helbeck and the young stepdaughter of his sister, whom the latter brings with her when she returns to her family home after the death of her husband. The girl, Laura Fountain, has been raised as a religious sceptic by her father, a Cambridge science don (like Ward’s brother-in-law, Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’), and she is initially repelled by the heady atmosphere of Catholic ritual that greets her at Bannisdale. That she and Helbeck, initially hostile, will find themselves fatally attracted across the religious tracks is so predictable that I won’t even bother hiding it as a spoiler, but where Ward goes with the story after that is much more unexpected. Not only are both characters torn, but, strikingly, the author is as well. Shortly after finishing the novel, Ward wrote ‘I have alternately felt with Helbeck & with Laura, and have loved them both’, and I felt the same oscillation of feeling as I read. That’s an achievement in itself, in a novel that dramatizes an intellectual and cultural and ideological division. Novels of this kind have usually decided on a ‘winner’ behind the scenes, however much they try to voice both sides of an issue. Ward also makes a brilliant and, in Victorian terms, counterintuitive move by having the female character represent modernism and the male character tradition.
There are various criticisms I could make of this novel. Laura and Helbeck are both superbly well realized, but most of the other characters in the novel remain in their shadow. Attempts to wheel in characters to represent other religious positions—the hardcore, Papist-loathing Methodism of Laura’s yeoman-farmer cousins; the tolerant, open-minded intellectual Anglicanism of her father’s Cambridge colleague Dr Friedland—feel a little forced. There was one episode, as well, which I found rather off-putting, involving an orphan girl as virtue-signalling accessory....but I guess that is the Victorian novel for you. The past has a different moral landscape.
On the plus side, there’s more than enough in this novel to outweigh these failings: some truly beautiful descriptive writing, worthy of Hardy, evoking the Westmoreland countryside where Ward largely grew up; the tragic, fate-driven sensibility that permeates the narrative, again reminiscent of Hardy; and the stunning imaginative feat of exploring two such different mindsets and feeling-sets as Laura’s and Helbeck’s, with such moving empathy for both. The quality of the writing is excellent overall, and I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to compare Ward with a canonical figure like Elizabeth Gaskell. I’m grateful to the publisher, Victorian Secrets, for unearthing this genuine dark gem.
November 9, 2018
Bannisdale was an old family home in the Lake District, a part of the world that the author knew well and brought to life with lovely and evocative prose.
“It was an old and weather-beaten house, of a singular character and dignity; yet not large. It was built of grey stone, covered with a rough-cast, so tempered by age to the colour and surface of the stone, that the many patches where it had dropped away produced hardly any disfiguring effect. The rugged “pele” tower, origin and source of all the rest, was now grouped with the gables and projections, the broad casemented windows, and deep doorways of a Tudor manor-house. But the whole structure seemed still to lean upon and draw towards the tower; and it was the tower which gave accent to a general expression of austerity, depending perhaps on the plain simplicity of all the approaches and immediate neighbourhood of the house. For in front of it were neither flowers nor shrubs—only wide stretches of plain turf and gravel; while behind it, beyond some thin intervening trees, rose a grey limestone fell, into which the house seemed to withdraw itself, as into the rock, “whence it was hewn.”
The story begins on a chilly March day, late in the nineteen century. Alan Helbeck has invited his newly-widowed sister, Augustina, and her stepdaughter, Laura, to live with him at Bannisdale. They had been estranged for many years, because he was a devout Catholic and his sister had abandoned her faith to marry an atheist scholar. She was happy that the estrangement was over, that she was home again, but she found that the house and the estate were much changed. The estate was diminished and the house was cold and bare, because her brother has sold land and valuables to support the Catholic orphanages that Jesuit priests had urged him to establish.
Alan was happy with that, and he would have followed his vocation and become a priest had he not been heir to the family fortune and responsibilities; but Laura was horrified. Like her father, she had no faith, but she saw the value of beauty and history, and she couldn’t understand why he didn’t appreciate those things.
Laura found the asceticism of the household oppressive, but she stayed at Bannisdale because she loved her stepmother and she knew that she needed her. She stayed even when Augustina reverted to Catholicism. The contrast between the two women, one who thinks for herself and one who follows the lead of her male protector, is striking.
At first Laura dislikes Alan and finds him very cold, but in time she comes to appreciate his thoughtfulness towards to her and her stepmother, and to appreciate the beauty of his chapel and the value of the good works he does; though her dislike of his faith and the priests who expect so much from him is unwavering. He is captivated by the spirited young woman, loving her openness and honesty, but worrying about her lack of faith.
Over times their feelings strengthen, and events conspire to make them declare their love.
I loved that this book didn’t lead to a marriage at the very end, that a proposal came a little before the story was half over, and that the rest of the book explored the difficulty of marriage between two people whose beliefs were fundamentally different.
It did that with a wonderful empathy towards all of the characters and their different feelings. I knew that the author’s own feelings chimed with Laura’s but she didn’t let that unbalance the story, and she didn’t let the ideas that she was exploring to unbalance the story that she had to tell.
The plot was well constructed and the writing was lovely. It had both academic and emotional intelligence, it evoked the time and the place beautifully, and it always placed the characters, their lives and relationships, at the centre of things.
Laura was a marvellous heroine; she was a ‘new woman’ with wonderful potential, but she was also young and grieving for her beloved father, and terribly torn between the ways he had taught her and the ways of the man she had come to love deeply.
I felt for her as she escaped to visit friends in London, and as she was drawn back to Bannisdale to nurse her dying stepmother ….
It was only at the very end of the story that things went a little awry. It was dramatic, it was emotional, but I wasn’t as convinced by the final act as I had been by the rest of the story.
I think that maybe that was inevitable, because a story has to have a resolution and the problem that the author set out could never be resolved.
That was my only issue, because I loved what the author had to say and I loved the way that she said it.
“It was an old and weather-beaten house, of a singular character and dignity; yet not large. It was built of grey stone, covered with a rough-cast, so tempered by age to the colour and surface of the stone, that the many patches where it had dropped away produced hardly any disfiguring effect. The rugged “pele” tower, origin and source of all the rest, was now grouped with the gables and projections, the broad casemented windows, and deep doorways of a Tudor manor-house. But the whole structure seemed still to lean upon and draw towards the tower; and it was the tower which gave accent to a general expression of austerity, depending perhaps on the plain simplicity of all the approaches and immediate neighbourhood of the house. For in front of it were neither flowers nor shrubs—only wide stretches of plain turf and gravel; while behind it, beyond some thin intervening trees, rose a grey limestone fell, into which the house seemed to withdraw itself, as into the rock, “whence it was hewn.”
The story begins on a chilly March day, late in the nineteen century. Alan Helbeck has invited his newly-widowed sister, Augustina, and her stepdaughter, Laura, to live with him at Bannisdale. They had been estranged for many years, because he was a devout Catholic and his sister had abandoned her faith to marry an atheist scholar. She was happy that the estrangement was over, that she was home again, but she found that the house and the estate were much changed. The estate was diminished and the house was cold and bare, because her brother has sold land and valuables to support the Catholic orphanages that Jesuit priests had urged him to establish.
Alan was happy with that, and he would have followed his vocation and become a priest had he not been heir to the family fortune and responsibilities; but Laura was horrified. Like her father, she had no faith, but she saw the value of beauty and history, and she couldn’t understand why he didn’t appreciate those things.
Laura found the asceticism of the household oppressive, but she stayed at Bannisdale because she loved her stepmother and she knew that she needed her. She stayed even when Augustina reverted to Catholicism. The contrast between the two women, one who thinks for herself and one who follows the lead of her male protector, is striking.
At first Laura dislikes Alan and finds him very cold, but in time she comes to appreciate his thoughtfulness towards to her and her stepmother, and to appreciate the beauty of his chapel and the value of the good works he does; though her dislike of his faith and the priests who expect so much from him is unwavering. He is captivated by the spirited young woman, loving her openness and honesty, but worrying about her lack of faith.
Over times their feelings strengthen, and events conspire to make them declare their love.
I loved that this book didn’t lead to a marriage at the very end, that a proposal came a little before the story was half over, and that the rest of the book explored the difficulty of marriage between two people whose beliefs were fundamentally different.
It did that with a wonderful empathy towards all of the characters and their different feelings. I knew that the author’s own feelings chimed with Laura’s but she didn’t let that unbalance the story, and she didn’t let the ideas that she was exploring to unbalance the story that she had to tell.
The plot was well constructed and the writing was lovely. It had both academic and emotional intelligence, it evoked the time and the place beautifully, and it always placed the characters, their lives and relationships, at the centre of things.
Laura was a marvellous heroine; she was a ‘new woman’ with wonderful potential, but she was also young and grieving for her beloved father, and terribly torn between the ways he had taught her and the ways of the man she had come to love deeply.
I felt for her as she escaped to visit friends in London, and as she was drawn back to Bannisdale to nurse her dying stepmother ….
It was only at the very end of the story that things went a little awry. It was dramatic, it was emotional, but I wasn’t as convinced by the final act as I had been by the rest of the story.
I think that maybe that was inevitable, because a story has to have a resolution and the problem that the author set out could never be resolved.
That was my only issue, because I loved what the author had to say and I loved the way that she said it.
May 22, 2015
Villette meets Brideshead Revisited in the style of Mrs Gaskell with an added dash of Wuthering Heights.
January 4, 2020
Helbeck of Bannisdale is a very surprising novel. It shows the huge clash between Catholicism, Protestantism (the Masons are Methodists) and atheism. Jesuits play a dubious role in the novel :-)
Throughout the book, it was very hard for me to like Laura Fountain. She was raised by a father who wasn’t a ‘churchgoer’; more to the point, he didn’t follow a religion whatsoever and raised his only child, Laura, the same way. One is briefly made aware of how Stephen Fountain, a Cambridge scholar, met and married the catholic Augustina, who denounces her faith/the church upon her wedding.
When Stephen Fountain dies, Augustina (Laura’s stepmother) goes back to Bannisdale, to her brother, and prompty embraces the catholic religion again. Laura accompanies her ailing stepmother to Bannisdale and is set from the start to ‘hate’ anything that has to do with Alan Helbeck and the catholic faith he so strongly avows. She meets relatives of her father’s who live a short distant away, but they are Methodists, which isn’t to her liking either :-) The bigotry can not only be seen between Catholism and Protestantism, but Laura herself is also guilty of it, in my opinion.
When Laura (21) and the sixteen years older Alan fall in love, everyone is against it, for a variety of reasons. One may even ponder if the Catholics are afraid to lose their ‘milch cow’, as Alan helps out financially wherever he can, even though he has nothing more to give. Alan funds Catholic orphanages, and in the novel mention of a new/elaborated orphanage is made, to which Alan is extremely committed.
‘Live and let live’ is something which doesn’t ‘prevail’ in the book, although Alan Helbeck comes closest to it, in my opinion.
A very, very interesting novel. (By the way, the novel has a very surprising ending.)
Throughout the book, it was very hard for me to like Laura Fountain. She was raised by a father who wasn’t a ‘churchgoer’; more to the point, he didn’t follow a religion whatsoever and raised his only child, Laura, the same way. One is briefly made aware of how Stephen Fountain, a Cambridge scholar, met and married the catholic Augustina, who denounces her faith/the church upon her wedding.
When Stephen Fountain dies, Augustina (Laura’s stepmother) goes back to Bannisdale, to her brother, and prompty embraces the catholic religion again. Laura accompanies her ailing stepmother to Bannisdale and is set from the start to ‘hate’ anything that has to do with Alan Helbeck and the catholic faith he so strongly avows. She meets relatives of her father’s who live a short distant away, but they are Methodists, which isn’t to her liking either :-) The bigotry can not only be seen between Catholism and Protestantism, but Laura herself is also guilty of it, in my opinion.
When Laura (21) and the sixteen years older Alan fall in love, everyone is against it, for a variety of reasons. One may even ponder if the Catholics are afraid to lose their ‘milch cow’, as Alan helps out financially wherever he can, even though he has nothing more to give. Alan funds Catholic orphanages, and in the novel mention of a new/elaborated orphanage is made, to which Alan is extremely committed.
‘Live and let live’ is something which doesn’t ‘prevail’ in the book, although Alan Helbeck comes closest to it, in my opinion.
A very, very interesting novel. (By the way, the novel has a very surprising ending.)
January 25, 2017
A little boring in places,had to finish it sad ending.The actual book I read is 119 years old it is in great shape for a book that old.Has an English book sellers stamp in front.
March 15, 2018
The edition I read was published by Victorian Secrets, edited and introduction by Beth Sutton-Ramspeck.
March 14, 2013
Fascinating as social history; with a tragic ending. Unable to reconcile her love for a Catholic with his faith the 'pagan' heroine kills herself. Thinking her death an accident, the Catholic hero becomes a Jesuit. This book was written in 1898, but it definitely doesn't read as a story set at the dawn of the twentieth century. In the distinction made between Catholics and others, it seems to be set much further back in time. But maybe it is accurately describing a pre-Vatican Two world, in which such a mixed marriage would indeed be almost impossible.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 19, 2011
Read and posted this some time ago, but my review, and any record I had read the book, disappeared!
April 21, 2016
Would've been 5 stars were it not for the unsatisfying ending. Review to come.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews