Dave's Book Blog: "Ann Veronica" by H G Wells

One of the 'social' novels of H G Wells, Ann Veronica was his attempt to understand the proto-feminist movement of the early years of the nineteenth century. His eponymous heroine wants to “be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected as something too precious for life.” (1.7). But her patriarchal father insists she stays at home: "While you live in my house you must follow my ideas.” (1.7) So she runs away. But living as an independent woman in a man's world seems to be impossible.

One man assumes he has bought her and tries to force himself upon her, after she has attended, as his guest, a performance of Wagner's opera about transgressive love Tristan und Isolde: “He made it very clear that night that there was an ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.” (9.5)

Another worships the ground that she walks on but “she realised she was in fact just a mannequin for her lover's imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of her being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreams that might move her, then a child cares for the sawdust in its doll.” (13.5)

She has actually fallen in love with another man ... but he's married.

Her journey takes her to the Suffragettes and to prison. Can she end up fulfilled?

Feminists today usually consider the novel flawed. It was not only written by a man, but a man with a track record of abandoning wives and mistresses (Wells fathered the novelist Anthony West on his mistress Rebecca West, author of Return of the Soldier; he also has affairs with Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs, and Elizabeth von Arnim who wrote The Enchanted April); I set this aside because if the character of the author is allowed to taint the work then the corpus of literature will be disembowelled and bowdlerised. Furthermore, Wells ridicules and lampoons the Suffragettes who are often regarded as modern-day saints but this just makes the truthful observation that protest movements may often be led by pompous idiots. But it is true that the ending is a cop out and that does mar the novel both as a work of art and as a political argument. But Wells, it seems to me, was writing a brave novel for his time (indeed, his established publisher rejected it on the grounds that the behaviour of the heroine would shock readers) and his protagonist is a fabulous character, feisty, full of fire, who, even though she blunders, always bounces back. I guess if you write a book that is criticised from both ends of the political spectrum, you've probably done something right.

In terms of its quality, it is true that many of the male characters are only spokespersons for a particular view. The father is the patriarchy, Ramage is a rake, and Manning is a ridiculed caricature of chivalry. Few of the female characters are given much air time except for the aunt. So in terms of the characters, the book's only real success is the protagonist, but in her, I believe, Wells triumphantly succeeds.

The structure of the plot is good; it is well-paced and I kept turning the pages. There are moments of delightful humour, such as the eternal non sequiturs and muddled thinking of Miss Miniver.

The style is determinedly Victorian - Wells refused to follow Modernist innovations - and he writes in the past tense using third person omniscient: although the action is entirely viewed from the perspective of the protagonist there are authorial interjections along the way. I enjoyed reading this novel and there were some profound thoughts along the way.

Selected quotes:

“The forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made them subtle and fine.” (1.2)
“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. ... Dim souls flitted about her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones.” (1.2)
“Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature and art.” (1.2)
“His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest quality; they would 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 ... Women are made like the potter’s vessels, either for worship or contumely, and are withal fragile vessels.” (1.3)
“His instinct was in the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property, bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a comfort in his declining years, just as he thought fit.” (1.3)
“Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried hastily under a cough.” (2.1)
“The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue of Mr Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of external coverings, the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on the surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's wrappered world.” (2.3)
“Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark vacancy, except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of a rat?” (2.3)
“I have often felt before that it is only when one has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning.” (3.1) [I think this is a gross calumny on Browning.
“Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly ... she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency of statement than a washer woman has for wisps of her vapour.” (6.4)
“Miss Garvice ... began by attracting her very greatly - she moved so beautifully - and ended by giving her the impression that moving beautifully was the beginning and end of her being.” (7.1)
“The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion.” (7.5)
“Life is difficult ... When you loosen the tangle in one place you tie a knot in another.” (11.5)
“Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.” (14.2)
“Life is rebellion, or nothing.” (16.1)
“Mr Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of what he styled latter-day fiction; good, wholesome stories were being ousted, he said, by ‘vicious, corrupting stuff’ that ‘left a bad taste in the mouth’.” (17.2)