Maisie Ward

Maisie Ward
Born	1889
Died	1975
Occupation	Publisher
Language	English
Genres	Biography, Apologetics
Notable work(s)	Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Spouse(s)	Frank Sheed
Children	Rosemary Sheed, Wilfrid Sheed

Maisie Ward (1889–1975), scion of one of Britain's distinguished Catholic families, was a writer, publisher, and speaker.

Life

Famous in her day as one of the names behind the imprint Sheed & Ward and as a forceful public lecturer in the Catholic Evidence Guild, her reputation has dimmed in subsequent decades. That is an ironic development given that she and her husband were ahead of their time in so many ways, foreshadowing most of what was good about the Second Vatican Council.

Maisie Ward hailed from genteel Victorian blue blood, but she literally earned her own stripes, first as a World War I nurse and then as a writer. She could claim author's rights to the first and only authorized biography of friend G. K. Chesterton – a book which, to this day, remains as galvanizing on its subject as is Chesterton’s own on St. Thomas Aquinas. And she also wrote widely in other areas, including New Testament scholarship, spirituality, and substantive biographies of Newman, her own father, and Robert Browning. Also falling under her pen's purview were the stories of countless saints and lesser notables, among them her personal friend, the accomplished writer and mystic Caryll Houselander (another wrongly overlooked voice).

In 1926 she and her husband, Frank Sheed, moved to London and founded Sheed & Ward. Words were the couple’s stock in trade. The amount and quality of what they wrote, spoke, translated and edited are a tribute to the contagious enthusiasm born of their felicitous pairing. ^[1] The couple have sometimes been cited as a modern Catholic example of street preaching.^[2]

Family

Ward was the great-great-grandniece of Robert Plumer Ward, father of Sir Henry George Ward and grandfather of Dudley Ward; the great-granddaughter of William Ward, and of Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 14th Duke of Norfolk and Augusta Mary Minna Catherine Lyons; the granddaughter of William George Ward, and of James Hope-Scott and Lady Victoria Alexandrina Fitzalan-Howard; the niece of James Hope, 1st Baron Rankeillour; and the daughter of Wilfrid Philip Ward and the novelist Josephine Mary Hope-Scott Ward.

Maisie and Frank's son, Wilfrid Sheed was also a writer,^[3] and their daughter, Rosemary Sheed was a translator.^[4]

See also

• Catholic Evidence Guild

Works

• Gilbert Keith Chesterton
• Carryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric
• Unfinished Business [autobiography], New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963.
• The Authenticity of the Gospels
• Catholic Evidence Training Outlines
• Robert Browning and His World: His Private Face
• The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition, London: Sheed & Ward, 1934.
• Insurrection vs. Resurrection, London: Sheed & Ward, 1937.
• The Oxford Groups
• To and Fro on the Earth: A Sequel to an Autobiography, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1973.

Further reading

• Dana Greene, The Living of Maisie Ward. University of Notre Dame Press (April 1997).
• Frank Sheed, The Church and I, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.
• Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

References

1. ^ Ignatius Insight
2. ^ LA Times
3. ^ LA Times
4. ^ Carlos Marighella (1971), For the Liberation of Brazil, translated by John Butt and Rosemary Sheed, London: Penguin.

Persondata
Name	Ward, Maisie
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1889
Place of birth
Date of death	1975
Place of death