WIFE WRITING BOOK ON BROWNING

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31087, 16 June 1966, Page 2

WIFE WRITING BOOK ON BROWNING

“I wish my wife was here, she is much better at this sort of thing than I am,” said Frank Sheed, a noted Roman Catholic theologian and author, at a press conference in Christchurch yesterday. But his wife, Maisie Ward, was still in Sydney.

Miss Ward was unable to accompany her husband to New Zealand because she was in hospital in Sydney. “It is the first time she has been sick for 38 years,” her husband recalled. Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward are members of the Catholic Evidence Guild in England, which was established about 50 years , ago to encourage Catholics, usually laymen, to talk about religion on the street comers.

“Our publishing ventures grew out of the street corners,” said Dr. Sheed, who With his wife has published about 30 books, mainly of a theological nature. At present Miss Ward is completing a very comprehensive work on the life of the poet, Robert Browning. She had been a Browning student all her life, but she was provoked into writing this work by a book which attacked Browning’s character, said Dr. Sheed.

“She is a prolific reader—she reads at 900 words a minute—and she has been searching out unpublished letters of Browning ail over the world. She found a vast horde in the University of Texas.” The massive work, which her husband described

as one of the most complete accounts of the Browning period, is nearly finished. Dr. Sheed has given his wife a deadline. They are going to spend September in Florence and after that he has threatened to send her book to the publishers, “no matter what.” “We each treat the other as the intelligent reading pub-

lie,” said Dr. Sheed. “She heTd a crowd in Times square. New York, for an hour, with quotations from Browning.” They have one son and one daughter. Their daughter, Rosemary, who is married and living in England, is a translator, and their son, Wilfrid, who has written four successful novels, lives in the United States.