After achieving extraordinary success with the best-selling Robert Elsmere (1888), a novel that follows a clergyman's crisis of faith, Mary Ward set out to write a story ‘concerned not with theology, but social ethics’. The novel that followed, Marcella (1894), shares with Robert Elsmere a structure that traces the protagonist's intellectual development in the context of late nineteenth-century social and political changes. While Marcella foregrounds the emergence of British socialism at the end of the nineteenth century, its impulse is intellectual more than ideological; it is not, as one reviewer claimed, ‘a sugar-coated pamphlet’, but instead examines the effect of political debate on the protagonist's emotional and intellectual development.

The novel follows the political engagement and social commitment of the young heroine, Marcella Boyce, from her early interest in socialism, through to her engagement with legal lobbying and social support, a career in district nursing and, finally, marriage. Although Ward's reputation as a fusty Victorian persists, due in part to her association with the anti-suffrage movement – and certainly not helped by Lytton Strachey's rather uncomfortable characterisation of her as ‘that shapeless mass of meaningless flesh’ – recent scholarship has contested this designation through careful readings of her work and a reconsideration of her personal politics. Marcella is certainly a form of bildungsroman, as these studies point out, but it is also a narrative exercise in nineteenth-century political liberalism in its sustained examination of the patterns of its protagonist's ideological deliberation. By the mid-Victorian period liberalism was, as Elaine Hadley explains, the ‘fashionable form of opinion’. Contemplative thought was, in fact, the principal form of political activity for the liberal subject. To engage in the processes of reflection, deliberation and abstraction produced liberal ideas, which then entered the public domain of political opinion.

This process of reflection and deliberation, or ‘liberal cognition’ as Hadley describes it, is one that provides Marcella with both its subject and its structure. Ward's novel gives substance to the processes of liberal cognition by following the development of Marcella's political convictions. As Hadley remarks, nineteenth-century political liberalism was preoccupied with how one ought to think, but not precisely what to think.