10 Facts About Maisie Ward

Mary Josephine "Maisie" Ward Sheed, who published under the name Maisie Ward, was a writer, speaker, and publisher.

In 1926 Maisie's brother Leo Ward was invited to be co-founder of the publishing house Sheed and Ward, but he proved ill-suited to the work.

Maisie 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.

Maisie Ward 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.

Maisie Ward remembered preparing for confirmation in 1905, when she was 16, with Mother Mary Loyola's book The Soldier of Christ, or, Talks Before Confirmation, and she then boarded for a time at the Bar Convent to study with her personally.

On leaving school, Maisie Ward returned home to work for her father when he served as editor of the Dublin Review.

Maisie Ward worked for the Red Cross as a nursing aide during the First World War, alongside the Daughters of Charity and Sisters of Charity nurses.

In 1919, Maisie Ward became a charter member of the Catholic Evidence Guild.

Maisie Ward wrote biographies of John Henry Newman, her own father, and Robert Browning; and on other areas, including New Testament scholarship, spirituality, and stories of saints and lesser notables, among them her good friend, the writer and mystic Caryll Houselander.

Maisie Ward died 28 January 1975 in Jersey City, New Jersey.