May Alden Ward

[1] Reviewers praised these books for their skillful synthesis of the existing scholarship,[5] and the New York Times singled out Ward's lively, clear prose style and historian's instinct.

[2] Author William Dean Howells commented that her work removed "the stain and whitewash of centuries" to reveal the underlying historical truth.

[2] Her subsequent book on John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Carlyle, Prophets of the Nineteenth Century, was hailed as masterly.

[2] She was also a charter member of the Authors' Club of Boston and one of the Massachusetts state commissioners for the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904.

She was killed in an accident when the car she was riding in on her way home from an evening lecture collided with an electric streetcar in Boston.