Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Penguin Classics (2005), Paperback, 352 pages
Description
Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML: H. G. Wells' Ann Veronica, first published in 1909, looks at political and feminist issues of the time. It's heroine goes from being a naive young girl into becoming a picture of the New Woman. The novel caused a stir when it was released because of the main character's feminist outlook and because her name was similar to Amber Reeves, with whom Wells was thought to be having an affair..
User reviews
LibraryThing member baswood
[Ann Veronica] by H G Wells subtitled a modern love story
A grown up story about a young lady growing up in early 20th Century Edwardian England. When Ann veronica was published in 1909; Suffragette militancy had been a fact of life for the last five years, the first world war was still five years
H G Wells' progressive, socialist views were well known to all his readers and it could be argued that many of his novels take on a sort of preachiness in tone that makes some of them disjointed, perhaps they are even used as an excuse for Wells to beat his readers over the head with his views. This is not the case in Ann Veronica, Wells had found a subject where he only had to give a true impression of a young unmarried woman's lot in life, and the difficulties that she faced to become independent, for him to demonstrate the follies of Edwardian social structures.
The story is told from Ann Veronica's point of view; we find her as a 21 year old woman living under the protection of her father in the suburbs of London. She is a bright, intelligent and attractive all of the things her father wishes she wasn't. He sees her role as looking after his household and caring for him. He is far too busy dealing with his work in the city of London to worry about Veronica. A crisis is reached when Veronica wants to go to an art school dance, her father forbids her to go and when she defies him he physically restrains her so that she cannot leave the house. Her only recourse is to run away, there is no one who she can turn to who can help her in her situation.
"“I want to be a Person said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky “I wii not let this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place”
There is a note of desperation in her voice as she sees herself in a pit from which there is no escape. She escapes to London and manages to find a bedsitter, but she has no way of earning a living or continuing with her work at the Imperial college of science. She meets Mr Rammage who she knows form her home town, he is a successful business man and when she goes to him for help he suggests a business arrangement and makes her a loan of 40 pounds sterling. Rammage we understand is a lover of women, rather like Wells;
“A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself” Ramage had said “a Woman comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may give herself.”
Rammage of course expects that Veronica will become his mistress and it is only when she narrowly avoids being raped by him that she realises the burden of debt that she is under. In desperation she turns her attention to the womens suffragette movement and volunteers to take militant action. She is involved in an attempt to disrupt Parliament for which she is unceremoniously arrested and sentenced to a month in prison. Wells' treatment of this suffragette raid is even handed, but told from Veronica's point of view it appears a desperate, frightening act, but one which she could easily view as her only course of action.
In jail she has plenty of time to think and comes to realise that the only course of action left to her is to return home to her father and negotiate the best deal for her independence that she can:
“I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman’s life is all chance. It’s artificial chance. Find your man that’s the rule. All the rest is humbug and delicacy. He’s the handle of life for you. He will let you live if it pleases him."
She gets to continue her work at the Imperial College and there falls in love with her tutor (Capes). Veronica never makes easy choices however and she discovers that Capes is married, but separated from his wife, who will not divorce him. The love affair between Capes and Veronica takes up the second half of the novel, but there are tensions here as well. It is only when Veronica takes decisive action that these can be resolved.
The novel falls neatly into two parts, but both depict the difficulties of being an independent woman in Edwardian England. Veronicas struggles in the first part are totally absorbing and the suffragette raid is vividly depicted. There are also the tensions of the love affair in the second part, but when these are resolved the novel fades a little at the end to a depiction of a young loves dream. Well's novel caused a bit of a scandal in 1909, not because of his sympathetic depiction of the suffragette movement but because of Veronica's decision to become Capes' mistress. A leading critic John St Leo Strachey condemned the book as "poisonous" because it treated female sexuality and sex outside marriage, not as shockingly sinful but as natural behaviour. Wells had not made Veronica pay for her actions and this is what upset some of the critics. I think there can be no better testimony as to how difficult it was for a woman at that time, and Wells brings this out brilliantly.
I have now read over twenty books by H G Wells and Ann Veronica is one of his best. You are never going to get a finely judged well balanced novel from him because he was always so impatient to move onto the next thing, but this one is better than most and so a four star read.
A grown up story about a young lady growing up in early 20th Century Edwardian England. When Ann veronica was published in 1909; Suffragette militancy had been a fact of life for the last five years, the first world war was still five years
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away and women would not get the vote on the same terms as men until 1928. The newspaper paper talk was of a sex war and Wells does not hesitate to plunge into this maelstrom of opinions with his story of Ann Veronica.H G Wells' progressive, socialist views were well known to all his readers and it could be argued that many of his novels take on a sort of preachiness in tone that makes some of them disjointed, perhaps they are even used as an excuse for Wells to beat his readers over the head with his views. This is not the case in Ann Veronica, Wells had found a subject where he only had to give a true impression of a young unmarried woman's lot in life, and the difficulties that she faced to become independent, for him to demonstrate the follies of Edwardian social structures.
The story is told from Ann Veronica's point of view; we find her as a 21 year old woman living under the protection of her father in the suburbs of London. She is a bright, intelligent and attractive all of the things her father wishes she wasn't. He sees her role as looking after his household and caring for him. He is far too busy dealing with his work in the city of London to worry about Veronica. A crisis is reached when Veronica wants to go to an art school dance, her father forbids her to go and when she defies him he physically restrains her so that she cannot leave the house. Her only recourse is to run away, there is no one who she can turn to who can help her in her situation.
"“I want to be a Person said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky “I wii not let this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place”
There is a note of desperation in her voice as she sees herself in a pit from which there is no escape. She escapes to London and manages to find a bedsitter, but she has no way of earning a living or continuing with her work at the Imperial college of science. She meets Mr Rammage who she knows form her home town, he is a successful business man and when she goes to him for help he suggests a business arrangement and makes her a loan of 40 pounds sterling. Rammage we understand is a lover of women, rather like Wells;
“A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself” Ramage had said “a Woman comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may give herself.”
Rammage of course expects that Veronica will become his mistress and it is only when she narrowly avoids being raped by him that she realises the burden of debt that she is under. In desperation she turns her attention to the womens suffragette movement and volunteers to take militant action. She is involved in an attempt to disrupt Parliament for which she is unceremoniously arrested and sentenced to a month in prison. Wells' treatment of this suffragette raid is even handed, but told from Veronica's point of view it appears a desperate, frightening act, but one which she could easily view as her only course of action.
In jail she has plenty of time to think and comes to realise that the only course of action left to her is to return home to her father and negotiate the best deal for her independence that she can:
“I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman’s life is all chance. It’s artificial chance. Find your man that’s the rule. All the rest is humbug and delicacy. He’s the handle of life for you. He will let you live if it pleases him."
She gets to continue her work at the Imperial College and there falls in love with her tutor (Capes). Veronica never makes easy choices however and she discovers that Capes is married, but separated from his wife, who will not divorce him. The love affair between Capes and Veronica takes up the second half of the novel, but there are tensions here as well. It is only when Veronica takes decisive action that these can be resolved.
The novel falls neatly into two parts, but both depict the difficulties of being an independent woman in Edwardian England. Veronicas struggles in the first part are totally absorbing and the suffragette raid is vividly depicted. There are also the tensions of the love affair in the second part, but when these are resolved the novel fades a little at the end to a depiction of a young loves dream. Well's novel caused a bit of a scandal in 1909, not because of his sympathetic depiction of the suffragette movement but because of Veronica's decision to become Capes' mistress. A leading critic John St Leo Strachey condemned the book as "poisonous" because it treated female sexuality and sex outside marriage, not as shockingly sinful but as natural behaviour. Wells had not made Veronica pay for her actions and this is what upset some of the critics. I think there can be no better testimony as to how difficult it was for a woman at that time, and Wells brings this out brilliantly.
I have now read over twenty books by H G Wells and Ann Veronica is one of his best. You are never going to get a finely judged well balanced novel from him because he was always so impatient to move onto the next thing, but this one is better than most and so a four star read.
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LibraryThing member john257hopper
An unusual H G Wells novel, being written from the point of view of a woman. The first two thirds of the story are about Ann Veronica's struggle to assert her independence, personal, sexual and political, from her father and aunt and their milieu; the last third are more of a conventional love
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story, mirroring Wells's life experiences and hopes at the time. It gets a bit too sentimental near the end and the novel ends about in time. Show Less
LibraryThing member cdeuker
Not quite as good as the History of Mr. Polly, but nevertheless well worth reading. I think of it as D.H. Lawrence light, not entirely a bad thing. Ann Veronica is looking for life with a capital L and is living in a world that offers women life with a decidedly lower case l. She rebels against her
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father, moves to London on her own, and then interacts with three men. Capes she loves, but he's already married (though unhappily, and wishes for divorce). Ramage would like A.V. as his mistress; he thinks he's rather obviously proposing and arranging this; she's too naive to see what he's up to. Sexual assault scene at a private restaurant is really well-written and gripping. Manning is the bland man in the middle, the husband her world would like her to take. She'd like to take him too, only she doesn't love him. A previous generation wouldn't have cared; Ann Veronica does care. The descriptions of living life to the fullest, of the value of love, etc. are Lawrence without the fire. Unlike Lawrence, they're never over the top--that's both their virtue and their flaw. Show Less
LibraryThing member AMcBurnie
I'd only read HG Wells' science-fiction, which all reek of their era, so this book was a surprise because it was published in 1909 but feels modern: the suffragettes, socialists and other trendy radicals that the heroine Anne Veronica gets involved with seem straight out of the late sixties/early
The atmosphere is modern even though there are still horse-drawn cabs, (along with electric lighting).
Anne Veronica wants to escape the prison-like restrictions imposed on her by her father, and runs away from home. She goes to suffragette meetings, but she can’t stand the thought of getting involved in demonstrations, badgering cabinet ministers and all the undignified consequences. The laboratory where she attempts to pursue scientific studies provides a retreat for her: she loves its relevance, everything in it is focused on pursuing and identifying biological structures. But she is not a wimpy Victorian woman (definitely not like most of Charles Dickens' females); she's a toughnut. When a neighbour, Mr Ramage (note, change the "m" to a "v" and you get the idea), tries to force himself on her, she beats him up. In reaction afterwards, she gets involved in a suffragette riot and spends a month in prison.
The end of the book drifts and gets soppy, as Anne Veronica runs off with her One True Love (a scientist) and they wander all over the continent, presumably screwing their bums off. It all ends in unlikely happiness when he turns to writing and makes a fortune. Nevertheless worth reading for the strange familiarity of this now more than one-hundred year old world.
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seventies. Wells describes the confusion of Fabian meetings and the “inexplicable enthusiasm” of the suffrage movement, with its “incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends”. The trendy revolutionaries have difficulty agreeing on anything and many of them are crackpots. The now familiar feminist political theories are presumably obtained from the author's many (all very bright) girlfriends - “Women have practically NO economic freedom,” said Miss Miniver, “because they have no political freedom." The atmosphere is modern even though there are still horse-drawn cabs, (along with electric lighting).
Anne Veronica wants to escape the prison-like restrictions imposed on her by her father, and runs away from home. She goes to suffragette meetings, but she can’t stand the thought of getting involved in demonstrations, badgering cabinet ministers and all the undignified consequences. The laboratory where she attempts to pursue scientific studies provides a retreat for her: she loves its relevance, everything in it is focused on pursuing and identifying biological structures. But she is not a wimpy Victorian woman (definitely not like most of Charles Dickens' females); she's a toughnut. When a neighbour, Mr Ramage (note, change the "m" to a "v" and you get the idea), tries to force himself on her, she beats him up. In reaction afterwards, she gets involved in a suffragette riot and spends a month in prison.
The end of the book drifts and gets soppy, as Anne Veronica runs off with her One True Love (a scientist) and they wander all over the continent, presumably screwing their bums off. It all ends in unlikely happiness when he turns to writing and makes a fortune. Nevertheless worth reading for the strange familiarity of this now more than one-hundred year old world.
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LibraryThing member Stevil2001
Ann Veronica is an interesting novel, mixing the way Wells met his second wife with the reaction to one of his first mistresses, Amber Reeves. It's about a young woman, Ann Veronica Stanley, who falls in love with her married biology demonstrator at Central Imperial College, G. Capes. (Weirdly,
Like many writers of scientist novels, Wells examines the relationship between science and morality, but as always, Wells charts his own path. Ann Veronica does not justify science's moral claims by showing how they replicate traditional moral strictures, nor does it denigrate science's moral claims by showing how they contradict traditional morality. Rather, Wells shows how science can be the basis of a new morality, though he is also careful to show that this is sometime a post facto rationalization, a way of justifying a behavior one has already decided to undertake.
That Ann Veronica and Capes possess an unconventional morality is most clearly demonstrated by their decision to become lovers even though Capes is married and Ann Veronica is much younger than him. When Capes objects that even their meeting together is against the rules, as he is her teacher, Ann Veronica replies that "This is something above all rules" (243). Later, she expands on this assertion, when Capes supposes that she will rationalize the story of his affair during his first marriage:
‘If I told you the facts […] you’d explain the whole business as being very fine and honourable for me – the Higher Morality, or something of that sort…. It wasn’t.’
‘I don’t deal very much,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘in the Higher Morality, or the Higher Truth, or any of those things.’
‘Perhaps you don’t. But a human being who is young and clean, as you are, is apt to ennoble – or to explain away.’
‘I’ve had a biological training. I’m a hard young woman.’ (245)
This passage attributes Ann Veronica's refusal to be bounded by the strictures of traditional Edwardian morality to her training as a scientist. Seeing like a scientist has enabled her to see events with a clarity that others lack. Her vision is not mystified by Christianity, but rather she understands the biological imperatives that underlie human interactions in the area of love. Capes cheated on his first wife because she could not satisfy him sexually, and Capes asks her how she classifies sexual relations:
‘Do you think of these things – these matters – as belonging to our Higher Nature or our Lower?’
‘I don’t deal in Higher Things, I tell you,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘or lower, for the matter of that. I don’t classify.’ She hesitated. ‘Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.’ (246)
Ann Veronica's scientific training hasn’t taught her that sex is all that matters, nor that love doesn't exist. Rather, it has caused her to classify sex and love on the same level, or even as the same thing. She sees nothing improper in sex because it is biological imperative of the flesh, and she sees nothing wrong with her love for Capes because it is tied up in that imperative. Her and Capes's love for one another is no different from her and Capes's sexual desire for one another.
But while it is possible for Ann Veronica to see this aspect of morality outside traditional thinking, it is not possible for her to do so with society more broadly. There is one passage that hints she has a larger capacity; as she learns more about biology, she begins to see that
the influence of the science radiated far beyond its own special field – beyond those beautiful but highly technical problems with which we do not propose for a moment to trouble the naturally terrified reader. Biology is an extraordinarily digestive science. […] [N]ot only did these tentacular generalizations gather all the facts of natural history and comparative anatomy together, but they always seemed stretching out further and further into a world of interests that lay altogether outside their legitimate bounds.
It came to Ann Veronica one night […] that this slowly elaborating biological scheme had something more than an academic interest for herself. And not only so, but that it was, after all, a more systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the deep […]. It was the same Bios whose nature and drift and ways and methods and aspects engaged them all. (134-35)
That said, the narrator claims this revelation "was but a momentary gleam of personal application" that she never follows up (135). She is in the process of learning to apply scientific vision to human affairs, but in the end, she is only able to do so for her personal affairs. When self-interest is no longer at stake, she doesn't have the drive to procede.
And besides, society won't let her. Capes and Ann Veronica both have to give up their scientific careers as a result of their running off with one another. They spend some time on the continent, they eventually do get married and return to England, Capes becomes a playwright (they are allowed to be more unconventional than biology demonstrators), and Ann Veronica is about to become a mother when the novel closes. They reappear in Wells's Marriage, which I haven't read, but I'd like to, because Ann Veronica seems to me to have a somewhat bleak ending: what acceptance society has given them seems to derive from the fact that they have conformed more to its expectations. I'd be curious to know if Wells had a more optimistic vision for the unconventional than Ann Veronica indicates.
* Capes is pretty clearly based on Wells himself: Wells was a married biology demonstrator who ran off with and later married one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Capes studied under the fictional biologist Russell, who played a significant role in the Darwinian controversies; Wells studied under Huxley, who played a significant role in the Darwinian controversies. Only instead of working at a university, Wells worked for a test preparation service!
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Capes never receives a first name, though in Wells's later novel Marriage, he is finally forenamed "Godwin.") As someone who has read more Victorian scientist novels than you can shake a test tube at, the differences from those are striking. The first is that one can take a science degree-- most Victorian scientists are self-taught, with medical degrees or the like. The second is that Ann Veronica is female-- there are very, very few fictional female scientists in the nineteenth century. Both of these changes can be attributed, I suspect, to the increasing professionalization of science. Now it's a thing you can take a degree in like any other thing, thus it's easier for women to enter into it because they don't have to teach it to themselves with their extra time and money.Like many writers of scientist novels, Wells examines the relationship between science and morality, but as always, Wells charts his own path. Ann Veronica does not justify science's moral claims by showing how they replicate traditional moral strictures, nor does it denigrate science's moral claims by showing how they contradict traditional morality. Rather, Wells shows how science can be the basis of a new morality, though he is also careful to show that this is sometime a post facto rationalization, a way of justifying a behavior one has already decided to undertake.
That Ann Veronica and Capes possess an unconventional morality is most clearly demonstrated by their decision to become lovers even though Capes is married and Ann Veronica is much younger than him. When Capes objects that even their meeting together is against the rules, as he is her teacher, Ann Veronica replies that "This is something above all rules" (243). Later, she expands on this assertion, when Capes supposes that she will rationalize the story of his affair during his first marriage:
‘If I told you the facts […] you’d explain the whole business as being very fine and honourable for me – the Higher Morality, or something of that sort…. It wasn’t.’
‘I don’t deal very much,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘in the Higher Morality, or the Higher Truth, or any of those things.’
‘Perhaps you don’t. But a human being who is young and clean, as you are, is apt to ennoble – or to explain away.’
‘I’ve had a biological training. I’m a hard young woman.’ (245)
This passage attributes Ann Veronica's refusal to be bounded by the strictures of traditional Edwardian morality to her training as a scientist. Seeing like a scientist has enabled her to see events with a clarity that others lack. Her vision is not mystified by Christianity, but rather she understands the biological imperatives that underlie human interactions in the area of love. Capes cheated on his first wife because she could not satisfy him sexually, and Capes asks her how she classifies sexual relations:
‘Do you think of these things – these matters – as belonging to our Higher Nature or our Lower?’
‘I don’t deal in Higher Things, I tell you,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘or lower, for the matter of that. I don’t classify.’ She hesitated. ‘Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.’ (246)
Ann Veronica's scientific training hasn’t taught her that sex is all that matters, nor that love doesn't exist. Rather, it has caused her to classify sex and love on the same level, or even as the same thing. She sees nothing improper in sex because it is biological imperative of the flesh, and she sees nothing wrong with her love for Capes because it is tied up in that imperative. Her and Capes's love for one another is no different from her and Capes's sexual desire for one another.
But while it is possible for Ann Veronica to see this aspect of morality outside traditional thinking, it is not possible for her to do so with society more broadly. There is one passage that hints she has a larger capacity; as she learns more about biology, she begins to see that
the influence of the science radiated far beyond its own special field – beyond those beautiful but highly technical problems with which we do not propose for a moment to trouble the naturally terrified reader. Biology is an extraordinarily digestive science. […] [N]ot only did these tentacular generalizations gather all the facts of natural history and comparative anatomy together, but they always seemed stretching out further and further into a world of interests that lay altogether outside their legitimate bounds.
It came to Ann Veronica one night […] that this slowly elaborating biological scheme had something more than an academic interest for herself. And not only so, but that it was, after all, a more systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the deep […]. It was the same Bios whose nature and drift and ways and methods and aspects engaged them all. (134-35)
That said, the narrator claims this revelation "was but a momentary gleam of personal application" that she never follows up (135). She is in the process of learning to apply scientific vision to human affairs, but in the end, she is only able to do so for her personal affairs. When self-interest is no longer at stake, she doesn't have the drive to procede.
And besides, society won't let her. Capes and Ann Veronica both have to give up their scientific careers as a result of their running off with one another. They spend some time on the continent, they eventually do get married and return to England, Capes becomes a playwright (they are allowed to be more unconventional than biology demonstrators), and Ann Veronica is about to become a mother when the novel closes. They reappear in Wells's Marriage, which I haven't read, but I'd like to, because Ann Veronica seems to me to have a somewhat bleak ending: what acceptance society has given them seems to derive from the fact that they have conformed more to its expectations. I'd be curious to know if Wells had a more optimistic vision for the unconventional than Ann Veronica indicates.
* Capes is pretty clearly based on Wells himself: Wells was a married biology demonstrator who ran off with and later married one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Capes studied under the fictional biologist Russell, who played a significant role in the Darwinian controversies; Wells studied under Huxley, who played a significant role in the Darwinian controversies. Only instead of working at a university, Wells worked for a test preparation service!
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LibraryThing member lisahistory
Brilliant novel in its portrayal of the feelings, both confused and coherent, of a young woman determined to find her own life and make her own way. Extraordinary insights into the female mind.
LibraryThing member DanielSTJ
This was quite a surprising novel coming from H.G Wells, as much as it was enjoyable. You really feel the plight, and unfair treatment, of Ann Veronica throughout the story and she becomes someone to root for. The story-line, characters, and setting were all very well done and I felt like this was
4 stars.
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a prime example of a social novel done well. Overall, I recommend it.4 stars.
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LibraryThing member infjsarah
I didn't know what to expect of this. It was a bit of a struggle to read because it is very much of its time in its refs to ideas and political movements. I was expecting more of a woman does science instead of getting married - but nope. Apparantly it was a bit of wish fulfilment by Wells so there
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we are. OK but nothing wonderful. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1909
Physical description
352 p.; 5.22 inches
ISBN
0141441097 / 9780141441092
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