They Came, They Wrote, They Conquered : MRS. HUMPHRY WARD; Eminent Victorian, Preeminent Edwardian <i> By John Sutherland (Oxford University Press: $24.95; 432 pp.) </i>

On April 10, 1920, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, “Mrs. Ward is dead; poor Mrs. Humphry Ward; and it appears that she was merely a woman of straw after all--shovelled into the grave and already forgotten.”

Mary Ward had been dead two weeks. Seventy years later, although largely unread, she is not altogether forgotten, and John Sutherland’s bold disinterment of this prolific writer and prodigious personality who towered over Victorian and Edwardian England makes enthralling reading.

At the height of her fame, Mrs. Humphry Ward, as she always styled herself (less a gesture of matronly modesty than a claim to masculine authority), commanded vast readerships and vast advances on both sides of the Atlantic. From 1888, America was swamped by competing pirate editions of “Robert Elsmere,” her mammoth novel of religious doubt. To her horror, free copies were given away with Maine’s Balsam Fir Soap, described by Sutherland, with typical dryness, as “a newly launched product which wished to impress on consumers the literal truth of cleanliness being next to godliness.”

Sutherland compares the novel’s American success to that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in Britain, both nations being virtuously fascinated by problems they did not have to face. The issue now raised, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ words, was the long-needed purging of “the obstructed channels of the decrepit theological system,” and even, so it was thought, the separation of church and state.

Part of the excitement was caused by the reaction of Gladstone, the British prime minister to whom the book represented a dangerous national trend toward agnosticism. He wrote a long, vehement, essay, “Robert Elsmere, and the Battle of Belief,” and, obsessed by the book, demanded a private interview with its author on the evening after her mother’s death. Their passionate argument was resumed at breakfast; she left “the wonderful old man” white-faced, leaning on the table, while she, trembling but unbeaten, went to follow the hearse.

The encounter typifies more than Mary Ward’s love of a good fight. She wrote, Sutherland suggests, precisely to prove herself to men of authority and power like Gladstone; the heirs of her grandfather, Thomas Arnold of Rugby: Jowett, Pattison and Pater at Oxford and J. R. Green in London; and above all, her own errant, backsliding father, Tom, and her uncle, Matthew Arnold. Her best novels--”Robert Elsmere,” “Marcella” and the fine “Helbeck of Bannisdale”--re-worked not only her own experience but the religious rifts that drove her parents, and her age, apart.

“Uncle Matt” memorably dismissed Mary’s first novel, “Miss Bretherton,” published in 1884: “No Arnold can write a novel; if they could, I should have done it”--doubly cruel, since she so wanted acceptance as a true Arnold. Nonetheless, she went on to become, in Sutherland’s phrase, a “fiction machine,” churning out novels to support her family.

Her earnings were high, and her fiction was serialized for top prices in America in the Century, Harpers and the Ladies’ Home Journal (whose cheap presentation galled her pride while it filled her purse). But rather than helping her family, she may have crushed them instead.

Her husband Humphry, art critic of the Times of London, took refuge in buying old masters (often fakes) and playing billiards at the Athenaeum. Refusing to enfranchise her clever daughters, Mary heaped her ambitions on her son, the ominously christened Arnold: Ineffectual in politics, disgraced in the army, his gambling debts absorbed all she had so laboriously gained.

Irony also marks Mary Ward’s other achievements. A founder of Somerville, the first women’s college in Oxford, in 1879, she went on to become the tireless leader of the Anti-Suffrage Movement and to write a virulently anti-suffragist novel, “Delia Blanchflower.” She opened two settlements for the London poor (University Hall and the Passmore Edwards Settlement), started the day-center movement and introduced schools for the physically handicapped, but spent her last years among the Hertfordshire gentry, a staunch Conservative and imperialist.

A final flourish of transatlantic fame followed her vivid, jingoistic accounts of life in the trenches. The first of these, “England’s Effort,” was written in response to a suggestion made in December of 1915 by her friend, former President Theodore Roosevelt, that articles from Mary Ward, who was at the time, Sutherland says, “the best-known Englishwoman in America,” might help him to swing American opinion in favor of entering the war.

What lay behind her urgent, swerving career? In 1856, when she was 5, her family returned to England after Tom Arnold’s first swing to Catholicism had put an end to a promising career as education secretary in Tasmania. When her parents, with her younger brothers and sisters, decamped to live under John Henry Newman’s wing in Dublin, Mary was left stranded in Westmoreland with her Arnold grandmother. Lonely and fiery-tempered, she struggled through grim boarding schools for the next 10 years until she rejoined her family, by now established in Oxford. From then on, Sutherland portrays her as driven by a desperate need to be “at the center”--of Oxford, London, the nation.

Steely self-will and hidden vulnerability were blended in her dealings with her family, her publishers and her political allies. All are meticulously chronicled here.

Sutherland’s approach, though cool and unblinkered, is consistently sympathetic; yet even he sometimes displays an appalled fascination at his subject’s monstrous energy, all the more striking since she was wracked by constant, devastating illnesses (which, like those of Josephine Butler or Florence Nightingale, often proved strategically useful). She battled on against all odds, dosing herself with remedies that would make a pharmacist pale, including a cherished hoard of “cocaine lozenges.”

As the Great War ended, younger writers--Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West--attacked or ridiculed “Mrs H. W.” as the embodiment of the most stifling Victorian values. Their hostility was a measure of her power. Even 16 years after she died, her nephew Aldous Huxley drew her as the smothering Mrs. Foxe in “Eyeless in Gaza.”

She left no literary heirs, and in that sense she was, as Woolf said, “a woman of straw.” But “splendid” was Mary Ward’s favorite adjective--and splendid, in an awesome, even tragic way--is exactly what she was.