RETURN TO CHESTERTON

by Maisie Ward

G. K. Chesterton was, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “a man of colossal genius.” Fittingly, then, his biography could not be limited to a single work. In 1943, Maisie Ward published what Frances Chesterton called “the definitive biography” of her husband. Yet its seven hundred-plus pages could not comprise the entirety of its subject’s life, work, and influence—his genius. Untold quantities of new material arrived for Ward’s consideration; the only natural course was to produce a companion to that definitive work. Hence Return to Chesterton , composed chiefly of unpublished letters, verses, and various wit of Chesterton’s, alongside sundry new stories and memories from his family and friends. The resulting portrait brings one face-to-face, not with Chesterton the author, but Chesterton the man. Maisie Ward’s competency as a biographer is proven by Chesterton “The best kind of critic draws attention not to the finality of a thing, but to its infinity. Instead of closing a question, he opens a hundred.” Return to Chesterton opens wide the doors onto the glorious expanse of G. K. C., inviting readers to walk through the world as he with rich humor and genuine affection, with an imagination as fantastic as fairy-land and a vision of God and his creation as clear as crystal.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1952

About the author

Mary Josephine "Maisie" Ward, a descendant of one of Britain's distinguished Catholic families, was a writer, publisher, and speaker.

Ward was born in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight on 4 January 1889, the eldest of the five children of Wilfrid Philip Ward and the novelist Josephine Mary Hope-Scott Ward. On her mother's side she was descended from Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 14th Duke of Norfolk and on her father's side from William George Ward, a prominent member of the Oxford Movement. All four of her grandparents were converts to Roman Catholicism.

She spent her childhood at first on the Isle of Wight, then Eastbourne, and finally in Dorking, before being sent off to board at St Mary's School, Cambridge. Here she was influenced by the preaching of Robert Hugh Benson and inspired by Mary Ward who had founded the order of nuns who ran the school.

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.[5] The couple have sometimes been cited as a modern Catholic example of street preaching. Sheed himself wrote a posthumous tribute to his wife under the title The Instructed Heart.