WARD, MAISIE

Author, publisher; b. Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England, Jan. 4, 1889; d. New York City, Jan. 28, 1975. Maisie Ward was the daughter of Wilfrid ward, and granddaughter of William George ("Ideal") ward. Her mother was Josephine Mary Ward, the novelist, daughter of James Robert Hope-Scott of Abbotsford. Maisie's education was entrusted to governesses and later to the Mary Ward nuns at Cambridge until 1907. She grew up in a family with many eminent friends and visitors, among them Chesterton, Belloc, George Windham, and the Baron von Hügel. During World War I Ward served as a Red Cross nurse. After the war she became a charter member of the Catholic Evidence Guild; she and a scrubwoman were its first two women speakers. In 1926 she married Frank sheed, a young Australian with whom she had worked at the Guild. Together they founded the publishing house, Sheed & Ward, and they were parents of two children, Wilfrid Sheed, the novelist and critic, and Rosemary Sheed Middleton, the columnist and translator.

Sheed & Ward brought a fresh and bracing spirit, considerable excitement, style, and wit to Catholic publishing, a hitherto rather heavy and unimaginative business. In the first number of their house organ, The Trumpet, was the notice: "In answer to many inquiries, we do not sell crucifixes, statues, rosary beads or medals; we sell books." Their goal was to lift the awareness of Catholic readers. They aimed, they said, "just above the middle of the brow," and introduced to readers not only new works in English, but such continental writers as Claudel, Karl Adam, Henri Ghéon, François Mauriac and others, up to and including Hans Küng. By 1933 the firm had opened a branch in New York City and Ward and her husband "commuted" from London. In 1939 the couple moved to the U. S. and Frank Sheed "commuted" the other way. The London office was completely destroyed in the World War II bombings; Sheed, in London at the time, rented a new office the following day. In 1960 Christopher Dawson remarked that the foundation of Sheed & Ward marked "an epoch in the history of English Catholicism," and "had changed the whole climate." The venture continued into the early 1970s and was then sold. It had belonged to an era between the final conflicts and agonies of Modernism and Vatican Council II. During those years Sheed & Ward helped many Catholics keep their minds open and their hopes up.

Besides being a lecturer and publisher, Ward was the author of a number of books. Possibly the most important were The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition (1934) and Insurrection and Resurrection (1937). "Transition" in the first title refers to what her father, the eminent editor of the dublin review, saw as the shift of the church from a 19th–century state of siege and its accompanying siege mentality to an opening to the world outside the church. "Insurrection" in the second title was the Modernist revolt, and "Resurrection," the survival and renewed life of the church after the crisis had passed. Both books are livened by the author's own recollections of many of the principals involved in that history. Other works of hers were a full biography, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1943) and her own favorite, Young Mr. Newman (1948).

Ward was also actively interested in such humane projects as the Catholic Housing Aid Society, the Grail, and the Catholic Worker. She was a person of remarkable energy, intellectual vigor, wit, and humanity.

Bibliography: m. hoehn, ed., Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches: 1930–1947 (Newark, N.J. 1948). c. moritz, ed., Current Biography Yearbook: 1966 (New York 1966). w. romig, ed., The Book of Catholic Authors (4th Series) (Grosse Pointe, Mich. 1948). m. ward, Unfinished Business (New York 1964); To and Fro on the Earth (New York 1974).

[e. d. cuffe]