What a pleasant life we could have had, I often felt, if we just wrote books and lectured; whatever made us start a publishing house?
—Maisie Ward, Unfinished Business
When Maisie Ward titled her 1964 memoir Unfinished Business, it was in part a reference to her iconic Catholic publishing house, Sheed & Ward, which turns 100 this year. Had she and Frank Sheed left it in good enough shape for successors? Her anxiety now seems justified, for since 1973, it has journeyed from one owner to the next. But as readers mark the centennial of the Sheed & Ward publishing house, we celebrate what “the Sheedwardians”—as that unlikely Catholic power couple sometimes called themselves—meant back in their heyday.
They created a global readership of both Catholic and interfaith intellectuals by aiming, as Frank Sheed put it, “just above the middle of the brow.” They normalized Catholicism and ecumenical dialogue for Americans in a way that launched the radio and television stardom in the 1950s of an Illinois-born author they championed, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, whom Pope Benedict named venerable in 2012. One could argue that they also helped make both the Kennedy and Biden presidencies possible.
‘Tea or Holy Communion, Sir?’
Mary Josephine Ward, known as Maisie, was born in 1889 on the Isle of Wight and considered herself both Victorian and Edwardian, growing up at what she called “the tail end” of an important and once-wealthy English Catholic family. They inhabited a world where visiting “Uncle Henry and Aunt Gwendy” meant going to Arundel Castle to see the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk. Norfolk was a historically Catholic title. England was still mostly Anglican at the time, and could be deeply hostile to its Catholic minority.
Ward’s parents were prominent authors and editors, with a roster of friends that read like the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Alfred Tennyson, the lord and poet laureate, was their neighbor on the Isle of Wight, even visiting to congratulate the family and see the new baby when Maisie was born. Tennyson’s friend, the extraordinary early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, made portraits of the family. Sir Walter Scott’s granddaughter was related by marriage. William Makepeace Thackeray’s daughter became Maisie’s confidante. Lewis Carroll’s nephew worked for Maisie’s father. H. G. Wells, despite his anti-Catholicism, was a social friend of the family, as was Aldous Huxley.
Maisie called herself “a grandchild of the Oxford Movement,” implying suffering as well as pride, because it upended the lives of all four of her grandparents. Grandfather William George Ward was a mathematics don at Balliol College, Oxford, who left the Church of England in a firestorm of Tractarian rhetoric in 1845.
He was the very first convert of the Oxford Movement, a group of former Anglicans hoping to debate England back to Catholicism. Called Tractarians (but only while they were still Anglican), they included, alphabetically and among many others, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Cardinal John Henry Newman and Newman’s mother, Jemima, and Mother Lurana White and Father Paul Wattson (the latter now beatified), who co-founded the Society of the Atonement known as Graymoor in Garrison, N.Y.
For the disgrace of becoming Catholic, Maisie’s grandfather lost his university post, graduate degrees, and in many ways his country, for in those days, wrote Maisie, “the Church of England stood for England.”
An Awkwardly Bookish Society Debut
Maisie Ward so loved books by the Loreto nun and international bestselling author Mother Mary Loyola that she transferred to Mother’s Bar Convent school in York for high school. Another teacher was the aforementioned Monsignor Benson, who published Come Wrack! Come Rope!, about English Catholic persecution, and the 1907 dystopian novel Lord of the World, which a century later would be a favorite of both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. Maisie became a standout in Latin and French, which would come in handy later in her life.
The Sheeds’ son, Wilfrid, wrote in Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents that if the 1910s had been less sexist, “She might have become a don, which would have been curtains for little me.” But women’s higher education wasn’t anyone’s priority.
Instead of going to college, Maisie made her London society debut. At her first ball, she recalled feeling like Jane Austen’s Caroline Bingley, enjoying the paintings far more than the dancing. Instead of making small talk with interested young men, she kept trying to discuss the Catholic faith. Her social salvation came when she volunteered as a medical assistant during World War I, working side-by-side with heroic Daughters of Charity nuns who were nurses. She re-read the books by her old family friend Cardinal Newman, vowing to continue his mission to “lay again the foundations of Catholic thought,” a daunting prospect in postwar England.
In 1919 Maisie joined the Catholic Evidence Guild, a movement of street preachers, as a charter member. Picture the former debutante standing high on a wooden platform in Speakers’ Corner at Marble Arch in Hyde Park, London, intoning Catholic theology to a jeering crowd, with mounted police hovering nearby for protection. It became obvious why London society’s teas had bored her so.
Frank’s Life So Far From Either England or Rome
Maisie’s future husband, Frank Sheed, was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1897. Though he was baptized Catholic (his mother’s family was Irish Catholic), he was raised Protestant. He remembered his mother’s parents as “the type who dream of the Pope and wake up in a cold sweat screaming ‘Rome’!” His father was an ardent Methodist who traveled for work. While their father was away for months on end, Frank’s mother took the children to Catholic Mass and catechism. When the father returned, so did Methodism, along with Marxist dinner-table harangues and anti-Catholic pamphlets for the kids.
Yet Frank’s Catholicism never wavered; he credited his mixed-faith upbringing with forcing him to use his mind in regard to religion, putting him well on the road to a career defending Catholicism in his folksy, amiable and mildly bawdy way.
Frank graduated from the University of Sydney in 1917. Three years later, he visited London during a summer break from law school and met members of the Catholic Evidence Guild. He initially had no intention of settling in London, but then along came the force of nature that was Maisie Ward.
The Oddest Power Couple
Frank Sheed was 22 to Maisie Ward’s 30, but she thought he sounded brilliant whenever he stood on the speaker’s box arguing for the Catholic Evidence Guild. Frank interspersed witty evidence for the Catholic faith with effortless Latin that Maisie understood from her York days as a classics student. She was so captivated that she sent a congratulatory postcard to this Frank Sheed fellow, and he became her able lieutenant. Maisie had improbably and at last found her intellectual and spiritual match.
In accepting Maisie’s leadership in the Guild, Frank lived what we would now call feminism, contending that “the best man must always have the job, even if that man happens to be a woman.” He maintained a career-long ability to recognize and publish the writing of intellectual women.
Their professional relationship gradually turned personal. Frank asked Maisie to marry him just before returning to Australia to cram two years of law school into one and finally finish. She said she’d think about it. She then went to Lourdes with her mother to beg Our Lady for the answer.
Afterward, she sent Frank a cable saying yes but in Latin, so nosy postal workers wouldn’t read it; 55 years later, after Frank died, that cable was found in his coat pocket. The family considered Maisie’s choices—such as preaching from streetcorners and marrying a loud, young Australian—to be “untidy” (her word), expressing dismay through euphemistic phrases such as “Maisie has chosen her own line” and “She has made her own friends.”
Through Maisie, Frank stepped into an orders-of-magnitude higher place in society, one they would navigate together brilliantly.
20th-Century Catholic Influencers
The idea of a Catholic publishing house came from Maisie’s mother, Josephine, and in October of 1926 she put up the initial money. Josephine had the know-how because of long experience as a popular and prolific Catholic novelist. In fact, the new press would one day publish her well-reviewed last novel, which F. Scott Fitzgerald praised to the most influential literary critic of the era, Edmund Wilson.
There were no exclusively Catholic publishers at the time, so the original Sheed & Ward occupied a necessary niche and was an almost immediate success. The original Ward in the name was not Maisie but her brother, Leo, who had left the Jesuits after a miserable novitiate. He was depressed and aimless, and their mother hoped publishing books might distract him, but his heart was never in it. Leo Ward soon discerned a call back to the diocesan priesthood, where he remained for life, and Maisie took his place at the press.
G. K. Chesterton was a family friend of the Wards and had known Maisie since her childhood. He was one of the first authors to publish with Sheed & Ward, remaining with them for the rest of his life (though his “Father Brown mysteries” were published by an earlier and rival press). He became godfather to their son, Wilfrid. Chesterton’s close friend, the French-English author Hilaire Belloc, also offered the Sheedwardians a book and continued to publish with them. The British priest C. C. Martindale, S.J., gave them his manuscript, Christ Is King, as a rather amusingly self-serving wedding gift, and became one of their steady authors.
They had some early good luck, including being banned in Ireland for a book about marital sex, which boosted their popularity everywhere. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson and the pacifist philosopher E. I. Watkin soon agreed to publish with them. In 1927, while Maisie was pregnant with their daughter, Rosemary, she corrected the page proofs of another new author, the biblical scholar Hugh Pope, O.P. While these are not household names today in the United States, their stature at the time in Great Britain shows what a glittering, if intellectually niche, world Sheed & Ward inhabited.
Karl Adam’s German classic The Spirit of Catholicism became their first bestseller in 1929. The English edition would inspire Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor, and their Italian translation influenced Pope Paul VI, who drew on it for his first encyclical. Instead of waiting around for manuscripts, the Oxford chaplain and radio broadcaster Monsignor Ronald Knox (their most published author) said the Sheedwardians spent energy “digging out and hounding on English Catholics to write the sort of books they ought.”
At first Frank went alone on lecture tours in the United States, but eventually Maisie joined him. They attracted rapt listeners on both sides of the pond who turned into believers, but they also continued to draw hecklers. Maisie wrote, “One atheist heckler in London attacked us for two years, another in Leicester for four; both became Catholics, the Londoner converted his mother and his brother and himself became a speaker.” Two hecklers became Cistercian monks.
During World War II, the Sheedwardians became part of the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights and the Catholic community at Corpus Christi Church (Thomas Merton had been baptized Catholic there in 1938). Maisie and Frank emceed packed meetings for young people, teaching them to defend the faith while being heckled. Two of those teenagers, Megan Rice and Anne Montgomery, grew up to become Catholic sisters and antinuclear activists, later serving prison time for peace and crediting their Sheedwardian experience for teaching them to handle conflict and adversity in living their faith.
A Catholic Intellectual Revival
“I give Frank a mass of untidy notes. He says ‘Hey Presto’ over them and they turn into a bestseller.”
—Monsignor Ronald “Ronnie” Knox in Maisie Ward’s memoir, Unfinished Business.
Sheed & Ward became the bestselling Catholic publisher in the world. It launched the Catholic Book-of-the-Month Club and then consistently sat atop it. It was proud of being a driving force of the U.S. Catholic intellectual revival of the 1940s and ’50s, as well as products of the English one that preceded it.
Using Maisie’s inheritance from her mother’s estate, it launched an office in New York in 1934, on the 100th anniversary of the Oxford Movement. The company received praise for translations of the Danish-Norwegian Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset, already well-known as the author of the blockbuster trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, and the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who through the Sheedwardians became friends with Thomas Merton and François Mauriac.
Dorothy Day published her first book, Houses of Hospitality, with Sheed & Ward. Her Catholic Worker cofounder, Peter Maurin, used to stop by to chat with Frank and draft his now-famous “Easy Essays,” some of which they published. Day was so deeply shaken by Maisie Ward’s death in 1975 that she sat for hours beside her good friend’s coffin.
Maisie used the isolation of the World War II years to finish the first of her two biographies of Chesterton. She also read Caryll Houselander’s work in Grail magazine and nudged Frank to invite Houselander to write her first book, This War Is the Passion, establishing her as what Maisie called “a writer of power and originality.” Houselander became a Catholic best-seller, and in 1962 Maisie published an acclaimed biography of her.
Sheed & Ward’s London office was bombed during the Blitz and completely destroyed. Only decades after the war, in 1997, did Maisie’s biographer reveal that Frank had worked for British Intelligence during the war. He wrote reports on pacifists, including Dorothy Day, whom Britain deemed communist. Frank defended her in his secret correspondence with British Intelligence, while nevertheless arguing with Day personally about the war because he supported U.S. military intervention against Nazi Germany.
Though the couple never became truly wealthy, and sometimes struggled financially, they always hobnobbed comfortably. They typically summered with the Time magazine titans Henry and Clare Booth Luce, who gave their son, Wilfrid, a car. They also appeared on radio and early television well before their popular author, then-Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, did so.
Wilfrid, who became a novelist published in The New Yorker and was a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, remembered many evenings spent with “unexplained little men from the Continent turning up to play croquet, comic priests in black dickeys bellowing songs round the piano (my father played as if his pants were on fire), and always plenty of gossip steaming hot from the Vatican or chancery.”
Complex Politics and the Church
“If one had to boil the Sheed/Ward American mission down to one sentence, it would be that Frank and Maisie finally gave Catholics permission to think without benefit of clergy.”
—Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents
Many conservatives revere the Sheedwardians because of Chesterton and Newman and their nurturing of Catholic theology, but it is more difficult to pigeonhole their politics. Frank declared himself apolitical, and his memoir, The Church and I, brims with compassion over whether the divorced should receive Communion (he argued they need it), whether contraception is ever acceptable (he said yes, but with caveats) and why he sought the perspectives of other faiths (he was strongly ecumenical). Both he and Maisie backed the U.S. war effort in World War II but were appalled at the use of the atom bomb on Japan.
On first blush, one might easily guess Maisie would have been the more conservative of the two, given her heritage, British social standing and devotion to both Newman and Chesterton. However, in other areas she took progressive positions, and her New York Times obituary in 1975 claimed she admitted a “bias towards the left.” For example, she started a real estate aid society in England, buying decrepit properties and renovating them for affordable housing. She interviewed draft resisters in prison.
She also devoted two full chapters of her memoir, Unfinished Business, to the French worker-priest movement, quite possibly influenced by her friendship with Dorothy Day. This was the same movement that attracted the passionate antiwar activists Daniel and Philip Berrigan when they were both young priests. However, Maisie’s soft spot for principled radicals only went so far. When a group of 72 French worker-priests who broke with Rome hoped to publish their manifesto with Sheed & Ward, Maisie said it wasn’t for them. As publishers they were comfortable challenging the Vatican from time to time, but not outright defying it.
The couple struck very public and historically progressive stances on race. They were influenced deeply by their close friend, the founder of Harlem’s Friendship House, Servant of God Catherine de Hueck Doherty. They called her The B, for the Russian baroness that she was, and she was one of two Catholic baronesses they knew. She publicly advocated for interracial dialogue and even marriage, still then illegal. Maisie and Frank hosted mixed-race faith conversations for young people in Harlem in the 1940s and ’50s, eras when such intermingling was almost unheard of. Sheed & Ward published important books by two African American Catholic women: Elizabeth Laura Adams in 1942 and three books by Helen Caldwell Day in the 1950s, including the landmark Color, Ebony about her experiences as a Black Catholic in the deep South.
“Logically, once you recognize the equality of the… races, where are you to stop?” wrote Maisie in 1962. “If you really believe that two Catholics are both members of Christ’s mystical body, by what right can you prevent them from becoming one flesh in the sacrament of marriage?” It is clear from Frank’s progressive writing on race in his memoir, The Church and I, that he agreed.
So What Becomes of Sheed & Ward Now?
Maisie died in 1975 in New York City at the age of 86. Frank died six years later in Jersey City, N.J., at the age of 84. They were survived by their daughter, Rosemary, their son, Wilfrid, and seven grandchildren.
In 1973, Sheed & Ward was acquired by the Universal Press Syndicate, which then sold the company to the National Catholic Reporter in 1986. In 1998 the Priests of the Sacred Heart acquired the company and its backlist. Rowman & Littlefield bought its U.S. assets in 2002. Bloomsbury Publishing then purchased that house in 2024. Senior editor Richard Brown, who works for Bloomsbury, led the brand for four years. What’s next is not known.
Recent Sheed & Ward books reflect Brown’s vision of “engaged Catholicism”: Emily Reimer-Barry’s Reproductive Justice and the Catholic Church: Advancing Solidarity with Pregnant Women; Ish Ruiz’s LGBTQ+ Educators and the Catholic Church: Embracing Synodality, Inclusion, and Justice; and Christine Schenk, C.S.J.’s Bending Toward Justice: Sister Kate Kuenstler and the Struggle for Parish Rights, about a canon lawyer and Catholic sister who challenged the U.S. bishops in a Vatican court and won.
While this recent output is solidly on the progressive side of the conversation, there is no political agenda or theological litmus test with these books, Brown said in an interview. Instead, “Sheed & Ward offers a platform for a new generation of Catholic authors to draw on Maisie and Frank’s legacy.”
Sheed & Ward, Brown noted, always published “the most significant authors of the day, wrestling with their tradition’s relationship to culture and faith, and doing it in a way that non-specialists can understand and appreciate. Some of these books may celebrate the church; some may challenge and critique it. But all of them will serve the mission of what Maisie and Frank founded almost a hundred years ago: a vibrant, vital ecosystem of ideas that contribute to a better, more informed understanding of faith and life.”
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