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Ann Veronica Stanley, a bright, restless biology student of twenty-one, rebels against her strict father's order not to go to a fancy-dress ball, leaves home…
Ann Veronica Stanley, a bright, restless biology student of twenty-one, rebels against her strict father's order not to go to a fancy-dress ball, leaves home for London and tries to live on her own. She joins the suffragettes, is arrested in a raid on the House of Commons and spends a month in prison, and falls in love with Capes, her married biology lecturer, with whom she runs away to the Alps.
Context and significance
H. G. Wells published the novel in 1909, and its frank picture of a young woman choosing her own life and lover caused a scandal; it drew on his own affair with the young Amber Reeves. Read Kipps and Tono-Bungay.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.