June '13 / HG Wells Reading: Ann Veronica

[Scheherazade]

In June, we will be reading Ann Veronica by HG Wells.

Please share your thoughts and comments in this thread.


Free digital copy

[neilgee]

Has anybody been able to get hold of a copy of this yet?

I ordered it along with a biography of Wells by David Lodge from Amazon. The Lodge book arrived okay but they sent Tono-Bungay instead of Ann Veronica by Wells so I've had to repackage and return it to them and now I'm waiting for the correct book to arrive. Hopefully it shouldn't take too long!

[Calidore]

Gutenberg has it here, free:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/524

[neilgee]

Ah, thanx Calidore, it's a little too late for me as my copy finally arrived today. You should start a free book thread as I've noticed there's a few on Amazon too that are free to download to a Kindle. I prefer to read a book in the case of a b.o.m as I can do that anywhere but my time on the pc is limited in comparison. So has anybody started the book, on Cal's link or elsewhere, anywhere at all, anybody at all?

[Gladys]

I had downloaded the book from Gutenburg early in the week, and am a dozen pages in. I loved H.G. Wells as a child but haven't read him since. I'm also finishing Dostoevsky's The Demons, which will slow my progress.

As for e-Readers, I particularly like the dictionary, highlighting, and searching earlier in the book for persons, places and happenings that are fading from memory.

[neilgee]

I'm finding it difficult to break away from the Wells biography which has changed my preconceptions going into reading Ann Veronica.

One misconception I had was that AV was more or less a true account of Well's affair with Amber Reeves, this is not true, the story and character are both only loosely based on Reeves and another young woman that Wells knew.

I also had the idea that Well's marriage was unhappy but the marriage wasn't unhappy in the strict sense, he and his wife were sexually incompatible but not necessarily unhappy. I also assumed that this was an isolated grand passion in Wells' life whilst he was married in an age where double standards ruled and divorce was difficult, but that's not true either because Wells was a serial philanderer who had an agreement with his wife that he could sleep with other women as long as it didn't endanger their marriage. Reeves had a child by Wells but married someone else.

Sorry about that digression but I promise to start the novel itself tomorrow.

[Scheherazade]

Finished reading. As soon as I am done with being puzzled, I will be outraged. Why, oh, why would Wells write a book like this? Very disappointed.

[mona amon]

I too finished yesterday!

I thought it was rather like an Enid Blyton with sex added.

Scher, did you find it disappointing compared to his other books, or disappointing in itself? This the first H G Wells I've read (and the last, LOL).

Neilgee, what I heard (mostly from Shaw's letters) is that he published Ann Veronica shortly after his affair with Amber, compounding the scandal and resulting in his resignation from the Fabian Society. The book was based on the relationship, but things didn't work out for Amber and Wells the way they do in the book. Perhaps it was a wish fulfillment view of the relationship.

[Scheherazade]

I thought it was rather like an Enid Blyton with sex added.

Did it make you think of The Bostonians at times?

Scher, did you find it disappointing compared to his other books, or disappointing in itself? This the first H G Wells I've read (and the last, LOL).

Both! It is a disappointing book, I felt. If it was about "love", it was rather clumsily done. (Was there anyone in Morningside who did NOT fall in love with Ann Veronica???) However, having read couple of Wells' other books, this one felt as if it were written by another author!

You should give another of his books a try before writing him off all together!

[neilgee]

Interesting that you mention Shaw, mona amon, as he probably comes out of the Wells biography with the least credibility of anyone. The way the biography tells it he didn't leave the Fabians because of Amber Reeves or the novel but because of people like Shaw who were holding the organisation back. Shaw was part of an "old guard" along with founders the Webbs who didn't want any change, you get the impression that they were just playing at politics and liked the attention and they froze progressives like Wells out. Shaw publicly humiliated Wells and that actually made Wells stay longer in the Fabians than he wanted to, because he didn't want it to look like Shaw had drove him out, but by the time he resigned he had been looking for a way out for awhile.

Anyway, I seem to be discussing everything but the novel again, er, I don't think it's as bad as all that, but what I think let's it down and why it hasn't aged well is Wells let's the omissions show, I mean I don't know about you two but I was conscious he was keeping sex out of it (again, referring back to the biography, that was supposedly the strongest part of Wells relationship with Reeves). It was like he resented what he couldn't say so much that he couldn't help showing it. I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, I've quoted a passage with the help of Calidore's link to show how some of it has been lost with the passage of time:

It describes Ann Veronica's encounter with the prison chaplain:

"Another young woman, I suppose," he said, "who knows better than her
Maker about her place in the world. Have you anything to ask me?"

Ann Veronica readjusted her mind hastily. Her back stiffened. She
produced from the depths of her pride the ugly investigatory note of
the modern district visitor. "Are you a special sort of clergyman," she
said, after a pause, and looking down her nose at him, "or do you go to
the Universities?"

"Oh!" he said, profoundly.

He panted for a moment with unuttered replies, and then, with a scornful
gesture, got up and left the cell.

So that Ann Veronica was not able to get the expert advice she certainly
needed upon her spiritual state.

Passages like that were rather lost on me. I get the impression this encounter is supposed to be enormously funny, but the humour has been lost in the mists of time, like so much else in this novel.

Scher's comment about every man at Morningside being in love with Ann V made me laugh, she does meet two men in a row who insist that they "worship" women, when what they mean is they want to put Ann V on a pedestal, I think it's all a bit stilted, a bit out of time, mainly because - at the risk of repeating myself - Wells is not able to say what he wants to say and it shows.

[mona amon]

Interesting that you mention Shaw, mona amon, as he probably comes out of the Wells biography with the least credibility of anyone. The way the biography tells it he didn't leave the Fabians because of Amber Reeves or the novel but because of people like Shaw who were holding the organisation back. Shaw was part of an "old guard" along with founders the Webbs who didn't want any change, you get the impression that they were just playing at politics and liked the attention and they froze progressives like Wells out. Shaw publicly humiliated Wells and that actually made Wells stay longer in the Fabians than he wanted to, because he didn't want it to look like Shaw had drove him out, but by the time he resigned he had been looking for a way out for awhile.

This is correct, but I think the affair with Amber did have something to do with it, especially since she was the daughter of two prominent Fabians. I'll try and do more research into it sometime.

Did it make you think of The Bostonians at times?

Oh, all the time! Since the subject is so similar one can't help comparing and contrasting, and of course poor Ann Veronica comes off worse in the comparison, James being a genius and all. His characters are all fleshed out and fully realized while Ann Veronica is mostly just a bundle of opinions, but I'd like to put in a good word for Ann Veronica here. James seems to consider feminism as something pretty unnatural, so we have man hating Olive and idealistic Verena whose natural desire for husband and children defeat her own feministic ideals. Wells is definitely the better feminist, and I can't help appreciating him for that.

[neilgee]

All my information is from David Lodge's biography A man of parts, I'm trusting him to have done his research for me! He also did a biography of Henry James (Author! Author!) which more or less confirms what you are saying about attitudes to women. James was celibate, he put his art first, and Lodge even hints that he may have been gaye, whereas Wells certainly liked women, lots and lots of them!

[mona amon]

I haven't read Author!Author! but I came across Wells's account of James's failure in the London theatre -

IT was an extremely weak drama. James was a strange unnatural human being, a sensitive man lost in an immensely abundant brain, which had had neither a scientific nor a philosophical training, but which was by education and natural aptitude alike, formal, formally aesthetic, conscientiously fastidious and delicate. Wrapped about in elaborations of gesture and speech, James regarded his fellow creatures with a face of distress and a remote effort at intercourse, like some victim of enchantment placed in the centre of an immense bladder. His life was unbelievably correct, and his home at Rye one of the most perfect pieces of suitably furnished Georgian architecture imaginable. He was an unspotted bachelor. He had always been well off and devoted to artistic ambitions; he had experienced no tragedy and he shunned the hoarse laughter of comedy; and yet he was consumed by a gnawing hunger for dramatic success. In this performance he had his first and last actual encounter with the theatre. ~ H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography

More about the incident can be found here - http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smart.../c19/james.htm I think the other anecdotes must be interesting too. Haven't yet read them all.

[neilgee]

I must admit what I've read from the link makes James seem like a much more ridiculous character than Lodge portrayed him as in Author Author. Lodge did say that James was an American who acted more English than the English. By temperment he was the archetypal English Victorian gentleman. When his brother wanted to meet GK Chesterton who was James's next door neighbour James refused because "you just don't call on people, you need an invitation!"

I wonder - or I have been wondering this afternoon - why Ann Veronica seems such a strange novel to us now, but AV wasn't the only work to come out of that era that hasn't aged well, nobody plays Shaw anymore, nobody even discusses his work for that matter, and yet when he was alive Shaw confidently told his fans that he was "better than Shakespeare" (the deluded fool).

When you look at the 1950s too that was an era that produced a lot of strange books that we can't quite understand the success of anymore (Hackenfeller's Ape, Under the net, Lucky Jim, The Grass is singing, and anything by Graham Greene, for examples).

Is it because these were periods of transition? Wells writing at the dawn of a new era with characters like AV's father desperately and futilely clinging to the old ways, the 50s were similar from that point of view, a time of waiting to move on. Is this why some books from these eras have a kind of reality that's only self-relevant?

It's probably a far-fetched idea but I just thought I'd share that.

[Gladys]

I finally finished Ann Veronica. A nostalgic yearning for childhood memories of reading several H.G. Wells' kept me going.

After reading Dostoevsky The Demons and Henry James The Bostonians, the Wells novel felt like a Mills and Boon romance. The former two novels play with a polyphony of possibilities, a fugue of characterisations, and leave you fervently contemplating what exactly has happened. The latter delivers the simplest of melodies, with saccharine excess towards the end.

A comparison between our novel and The Bostonians, both dealing overtly with feminism, is instructive. Both Ann Veronica and everyone else in the novel follow unsurprising trajectories, towards a happy ending. I couldn't avoid the impression that Wells was writing a paean or apologia in support of adultery and, in particular, his own. The mood of the closing chapters was far too rosy and laboured to be true.

By contrast, Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians remains inscrutably marvellous to the end. I still wonder over her.