Ann Veronica

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

When it was first published in 1909, Ann Veronica caused a sensation, due to Wells' groundbreaking treatment of female sexuality Twenty-one, passionate and headstrong, Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to live her own life. When her father forbids her from attending a fashionable ball, she leaves her family home and make a fresh start in London. There, she finds a world where she can be truly free. But when she meets the brilliant Capes, a married academic, and quickly falls in love, she soon finds that freedom comes at a price.

Release date: January 12, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

Flora Fraser

 

 

I am delighted to introduce Ann Veronica, the novel to which H.G. Wells gave the subtitle A Modern Love Story when it was first published in 1909. Wells is a master of detail, conjuring up his engaging heroine, Miss Ann Veronica Stanley, without difficulty and from material lying close at hand. Aged ‘twenty-one and a half years old’, she is a student of science, and yo-yos between her father’s suburban home and the laboratories of various halls of learning in London. The city offers a life less ordinary, not to mention more hectic and romantic, than does the suburb of ‘Morningside Park’. But London will also exhibit a darker side.

Miss Stanley is emphatically a ‘New Woman’ – a known species by 1909. These fervent young women emerged in the late nineteenth century and strove, in the years before the First World War, towards higher education, votes for women, a degree of sexual liberation and financial independence. Ann Veronica contains any number of disquisitions, on the part of its focal character, on these important subjects. But while many ‘New Women’ of literature – and even some real ‘New Women’ – pall by their very worthiness a hundred years on, Ann Veronica is less worthy than earthy, and her monologues – for she is often alone – have the freshness of speech rooted in reality.

This can be explained by the fact ‘Ann Veronica’ is a kind of composite character, based on two women whom Wells knew intimately. While he was teaching in the 1890s he ran off with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, of whom he made a wife – his second – and a mother. From her he ran off briefly with another student – Amber Reeves, a Newnham girl with a double first – and made her a mother though not a wife. He drew on his experiences with both females when composing Ann Veronica, although one of Wells’ children, his son by Rebecca West, later gave the palm to Amber: ‘She [‘Ann Veronica’] was all too clearly drawn from life. She used turns of phrase familiar to everyone who knew Amber Reeves, spoke in her voice and behaved as she behaved . . . ’1 In a preface he wrote for an American edition, Wells later boasted of Ann Veronica, ‘it was among the first studies ever made of the young woman of the English intelligentsia’.2

As Wells makes clear in Ann Veronica, many of the personal and political freedoms sought by the earlier ‘New Woman’ had been achieved by 1909. Fifteen or twenty years earlier, society had accepted that young women should ride a bicycle, smoke cigarettes and in some cases possess a latchkey to their parents’ home. Women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge had been founded in the 1860s and 1870s, and by the 1880s both universities, as well as London University, had opened their examinations to women and were awarding them degrees. Thus when ‘Ann Veronica’ studies at an establishment very like the Normal School of Science – later Imperial College London, where Wells himself had studied in the 1880s – she is, if advanced, not exceptional for her time. Episodes in the novel depict women accustomed to playing a part, albeit a part that ‘Ann Veronica’ finds at times confused and confusing, in meetings of the Fabian Society and suffragette movement. Our heroine is, however, all ‘New Woman’ in her quest to find meaning in her life and in her condemnation of convention and taboo. Of all the devices Wells uses to emphasise her journey towards emancipation, the most striking are the physical tussles, some sexual, some with figures of authority, in which ‘Ann Veronica’ participates and from which she emerges each time breathless but invigorated and liberated.

Among the most vivid scenes in Ann Veronica is a re-enactment, with fictional licence but realistic detail, of the famous attempt by suffragettes, in 1908, to storm the House of Commons. In other literature Wells endorses the feminist cause, a cause that was to see the suffrage extended to women over thirty in 1918 and to those of ‘Ann Veronica’s’ own age ten years later. But in Ann Veronica there is ultimately only manifest disillusionment with the suffragettes and other activists who aimed at political reform. Again, this is biographical, for Wells had recently parted political company with the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb among them.

Those who enjoyed Wells’ novels in the Edwardian years – feminists and social reformers, the scientifically inclined and the enterprising young – were deprived in Ann Veronica of their usual futuristic prey. Today’s readers will note passages in the text that hint at grander themes never developed. In the later American preface, Wells acknowledges that he was not entirely satisfied with Ann Veronica as the portmanteau for controversial ideas about the society of his day as which he had originally envisaged it. On the other hand, the author was unrepentant. He felt that, in Ann Veronica, he had produced the best love story he had ever composed. Furthermore, in the same American preface in which he acknowledged the novel’s limitations, he wrote of attacks on the book that they proved that ‘Ann Veronica was alive to a very high degree . . .’3

Few readers today will feel that this is the best love story they have ever read. At points the book reads as if made for serialisation, with cliffhangers, new relationships, and melodrama worthy of Dickens bristling at every turn. Indeed E.M. Forster, Wells’ contemporary, set out in his Commonplace Book parallels between the two writers:

 

. . . low birth, cockney outlook, comedy, social problems – relish indignation. Put people into their books and deny they have done so afterwards. W.’s power of observation stronger – he photographs those he meets and agitates the photographs. D. relies more on types.4

 

If that were all, then one could comfortably catalogue this book amongst the ‘Galsworthy, Bennet, Wells school of fiction’ to which Virginia Woolf alludes in her 1939 ‘Sketch of the Past’ and let it rest for years unread on the bookshelf with The Forsyte Saga and Clayhanger.5 But Ann Veronica created a storm when it came out. And it nearly did not come out, as Wells’ usual publishers refused to publish it, fearing a storm of scandal that did indeed ensue when another publisher, Unwin’s, took up the challenge. Unwin’s was victorious as sales were brisk but the Spectator magazine deemed the novel ‘pernicious’, a library committee in Manchester banned its circulation, and Wells had to resign from the Savile Club, a London establishment where a Fabian friend, William Pember Reeves, had been his sponsor.

To explain why in too much detail would be to steal the thunder from Ann Veronica. Suffice it to say that the Fabians disliked their representation in the book, the suffragettes were up in arms about their depiction, and respectable men and women everywhere were outraged by ‘Ann Veronica’s’ plunge into sordid worlds fit only to be inhabited by mature and married men.

It was also the case that Ann Veronica came out at the time when Wells was widely known to have seduced Amber Reeves, the daughter of William Pember Reeves of the Savile Club. Beatrice Webb wrote of Wells having seduced the girl ‘within the very walls of Newnham, having been permitted, as an old friend, to go to her room’.6 In any case, Amber was seven months pregnant by Wells when Ann Veronica came out, although, in an effort to whitewash a messy business, a husband, Rivers Blanco White, was provided before the baby was born. Wells remained married to his second wife, Catherine, till her death years later, and lived with her and their two sons, while continuing the relationship with Amber.

One further historical footnote may be of interest before embarkation with ‘Ann Veronica’ on a sea of free love. Rebecca West reviewed Marriage, another of Wells’ novels, in 1912:

 

‘Of course he is the Old Maid among novelists . . .’, she wrote; ‘even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli [another novel that featured a girl resembling Amber Reeves] like cold white sauce was merely Old Maids’ mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’7

 

Wells responded by asking West to lunch and within two years ‘Old Maid’ and young maid were enjoying a celebrated love affair, to which, it could be said, Ann Veronica had contributed.

 

 

1 Anthony West, H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (London, 1984), p15

2 H.G. Wells, Works. Atlantic Edition. 28 vols (New York, 1924–27): vol 13, Ann Veronica and Boon, preface

3 Ibid.

4 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London, 2005), p169

5 Virginia Woolf : Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London, 2002), p92

6 Norman and Jeane Mackenzie, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 1858–1943, 4 vols (London, 1982–85): vol 3 (1984), p125

7 From Freewoman,  September 1912, 11, p346–8. Quoted in Patrick Parrinder: H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (London, 1997), p203

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Ann Veronica Talks to Her Father

 

1

 

One Wednesday afternoon in late September Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excite ment and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to see and horrified her grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving in. ‘Lord!’ she said. She jumped up at once, caught up a leather clutch containing note-books, a fat text-book, and a chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she had to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as the result of her precipitation. ‘Sold again,’ she remarked. ‘Idiot!’ She raged inwardly, while she walked along with that air of self-contained serenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under the eye of the world.

She walked down the station approach, past the neat, unobtrusive offices of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate by the butcher’s shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside the post office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in grey flannels, who was elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely unaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent her by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the avenue.

‘Umph!’ he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning it to the pillar-box. ‘Here goes,’ he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for some seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to a whistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. ‘It’s either now or never,’ she said to herself . . .

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people say, come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three parts. There was first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously elegant curve from the railway station into an undeveloped wilderness of agriculture, with big yellow brick villas on either side, and then there was the Pavement, the little clump of shops about the post office, and under the railway arch was a congestion of workmen’s dwellings. The road from Surbiton and Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very brassy window blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into the Avenue again.

‘It’s either now or never,’ said Ann Veronica again, ascending this stile. ‘Much as I hate rows. I’ve either got to make a stand or give in altogether.’

She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the new red-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to be making some sort of inventory. ‘Ye gods!’ she said at last. ‘What a place!

‘Stuffy isn’t the word for it.

‘I wonder what he takes me for?’

When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of internal conflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her warm-tinted face. She had now the clear and tranquil expression of one whose mind is made up. Her back had stiffened, and her hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.

As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted young man in grey flannels appeared. There was a certain air of forced fortuity in his manner. He saluted awkwardly. ‘Hallo, Vee!’ he said.

‘Hallo, Teddy!’ she answered.

He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.

But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that he was committed to the path across the fields, an uninteresting walk at the best of times.

‘Oh! dammit!’ he remarked, ‘dammit!’ with great bitterness as he faced it.

 

 

2

 

Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She had black hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them subtle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, and walked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonly and habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little and was preoccupied. Her lips came together with an expression between contentment and the faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of quiet reserve, and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and eager for freedom and life.

She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient – she did not clearly know for what to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in coming. All the world about her seemed to be – how can one put it? – in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colours these grey swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or doors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones . . .

During her schooldays, especially her earlier schooldays, the world had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do, giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the most suitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that there was a considerable group of interests called being in love and getting married, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments, such as flirtation and ‘being interested’ in people of the opposite sex. She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older schoolmates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress or bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of. Nevertheless Ann Veronica found it a difficult matter not to think of these things. However, having a considerable amount of pride, she decided she would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind away from them just as far as she could; but it left her at the end of her schooldays with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose ends.

The world, she discovered, with these matters barred, had no particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting in her father’s house. She thought study would be better. She was a clever girl, the best of her year in the high school, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham, but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl at a friend’s dinner-table, and he thought that sort of thing unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to live at home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science course at the Tredgold Women’s College – she had already matriculated into London University from school – she came of age, and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and presently, because of her aunt’s censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend to accompany her. She passed her general science examination with double honours and specialized in science. She happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself chafing at the limitations of the lady B.Sc. who retailed a store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and foggy – it is the test of the good comparative anatomist – upon the skull. She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on with her work at the fountain head.

She had asked about that already, and her father had replied evasively: ‘We’ll have to see about that, little Vee; we’ll have to see about that.’ In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until she seemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in the meantime a smaller conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, and in fact the question of Ann Veronica’s position generally, to an acute issue.

In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants, and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was a certain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts, with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly. Mr Widgett was a journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-grey tweed suit and ‘art’ brown ties; he smoked corn-cob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station. He had one son, who had been coeducated, and three daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the high school, and had done much to send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literature at home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in the key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from the high school to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life of art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries, talking about work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and again they drew Ann Veronica from her sound persistent industry into the circle of these experiences. They had asked her to come to the first of the two great annual Fadden dances, the October one, and Ann Veronica had accepted with enthusiasm. And now her father said she must not go.

He had ‘put his foot down,’ and said she must not go.

Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica’s tact had been ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear fancy dress in the likeness of a corsair’s bride, and the other was that she was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dance was over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in ‘quite a decent little hotel’ near Fitzroy Square.

‘But, my dear!’ said Ann Veronica’s aunt.

‘You see,’ said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a difficulty. ‘I’ve promised to go. I didn’t realize— I don’t see how I can get out of it now.’

Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her, not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly ignoble method of prohibition. ‘He couldn’t look me in the face and say it,’ said Ann Veronica. ‘But of course it’s aunt’s doing really.’

And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home she said to herself: ‘I’ll have it out with him somehow. I’ll have it out with him. And if he won’t—’

But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at that time.

 

 

3

 

Ann Veronica’s father was a solicitor with a good deal of company business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-grey hair, grey eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small circular baldness at the crown of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at irregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as a parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and inattentive; and he called her his ‘little Vee,’ and patted her unexpectedly and disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of any age between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a game he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopic petrography.

He ‘went in’ for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner as his ‘hobby’. A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind to technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship with a Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had remarkably skilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had become one of the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world. He spent a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatus and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignified manner. He did it, he said, ‘to distract his mind’. His chief successes he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their high technical merit never failed to excite admiration. Their scientific value was less considerable since he chose rocks entirely with a view to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the ‘theorizers’ produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but they were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating, wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of distinctions . . .

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, also in order ‘to distract his mind’. He read it in winter in the evening after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to monopolize the lamp and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin slippers across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mind needed so much distraction. His favourite newspaper was The Times, which he began at breakfast in the morning, often with manifest irritation, and carried off to finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.

It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he was younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely obliterated the impression of its predecessor. But she certainly remembered that when she was a little girl he sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode a bicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the front door. And in those days, too, he used to help her mother with her gardening, and hover about her while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to the scullery wall.

It had been Ann Veronica’s lot as the youngest child to live in a home that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her mother had died when she was thirteen, her two much elder sisters had married off – one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had gone out into the world well ahead of her, and so she had made what she could of her father. But he was not a father one could make much of.

His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure and good for life. He made this simple classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held that the two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from one another. Women are made like the potter’s vessels, either for worship or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted daughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed his chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved his dark-eyed, dainty, bright-coloured, and active little wife with a real vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had always felt (he had never allowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their family was a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion. He had, however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certain human amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One was in the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother’s care.

He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.

Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs about gaily, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous quantities of soft hair and more power of expressing affection than its brothers. It is a lovely little appendage to the mother who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her, gestures with her very gestures. It makes wonderful sentences that you can repeat in the City and are good enough for Punch. You call it a lot of nicknames: ‘Babs’ and ‘Bibs’ and ‘Viddles’ and ‘Vee’; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back. It loves to s. . .