Mary Josephine "Maisie" Ward Sheed (4 January 1889 – 28 January 1975), 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 took his place when Leo left to become a priest.[1]
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.[2] She remembered preparing for confirmation in 1905, when she was 16, with Mother Mary Loyola's book The Soldier of Christ, or, Talks Before Confirmation (1900), and she then boarded for a time at the Bar Convent to study with her personally.[3]
Career
On leaving school, Maisie returned home to work for her father when he served as editor of the Dublin Review.[4] She worked for the Red Cross as a nursing aide during the First World War, alongside the Daughters of Charity and Sisters of Charity nurses. After her father's death in 1916 she co-edited with her mother a posthumous collection of his last lectures.[5]
In 1919, Ward became a charter member of the Catholic Evidence Guild. Ward was a forceful public lecturer. It was through the Guild that she met Frank Sheed. The couple have sometimes been cited as a modern Catholic example of street preaching.[6] They were married in 1926; that same year, they moved to London and founded Sheed and Ward publishing.
Ward gained fame for her authorized biography of friend G. K. Chesterton, written at the request of Chesterton's widow.[7] Ward also 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. Sheed wrote a posthumous tribute to his wife under the title The Instructed Heart.[8]