Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a book published four or more years ago.

“ANN VERONICA” by H.G.Wells (first published 1909)

 

It’s nine years since, back in 2013,  I commented on a book by H.G.Wells. The book was Tono-Bungay which, as I explained, has sometimes been promoted as Wells’ best “literary” novel by academics who want Wells to be taught in Eng. Lit. departments. Recently, serendipity has brought me back to re-considering Wells. In my recent survey of all the novels of David Lodge, I re-read Lodge’s A Man of Parts  (see All You Need to Know About the Novels of David Lodge, Part Three) which is basically an exhaustive (and exhausting) account of H.G.Wells’s very active sex life. In turn, this led me to re-read, after many years, Wells’s Ann Veronica, the novel that is most directly connected to one of Wells’s longer affairs.

To explain why the novel was written and its original reception, some context has to be given. Beginning in 1907, H.G.Wells (1866-1946), in his early 40s, began an affair with New Zealand-born Amber Reeves (1887- 1981), who was just 20 and studying Philosophy at Cambridge. Wells had a companionate marriage. His wife Jane condoned all his affairs and was willing to serve without complaint as housekeeper and mother of his two sons. But Amber’s parents, Maud and William Pember Reeves, were appalled by the affair. They were respectable, liberal members of the Fabian Society. William Pember Reeves had served as cabinet minister in Richard Seddon’s government in New Zealand, and he was now in London as High Commissioner for New Zealand. The Reeveses complained about the way this caddish, adulterous author had seduced their young daughter, and fellow Fabians like George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb agreed with their complaints. Amber became pregnant and bore a daughter to Wells, but the strains of the affair became too much for them. So Wells arranged for Amber to marry another man – a man who had wooed her for some time – so that she could have respectability. Amber Reeves and H.G.Wells remained “friends” for many years, and Wells soon moved on to his next conquest, having a turbulent affair with the young Rebecca West. He really was a serial shagger.

However, while still emotionally attached to Amber Reeves, Wells wrote Ann Veronica, a thinly disguised version of their affair. It is a novel about the New Woman and Free Love, and as such it was considered a scandalous piece of work. Wells was already an established author with a large readership, but his usual publishers were so worried about the novel’s content that they turned it down before it was accepted by a different publishing house. Its condoning of extramarital sex was loudly denounced by a number of reviewers and some of the clergy, which naturally boosted the novel’s sales.

Now it is so easy to pick out the flaws of Ann Veronica, and the novel is dated in so many ways, that I’ll begin by saying what is right about it.

Ann Veronica Stanley is the 21-year-old daughter of a reasonably affluent stockbroker, living in suburban comfort, but her papa is a bit of a tyrant and strict in upholding the laws of conventional morality. Ann Veronica’s mother is dead, and her unmarried aunt, known as Miss Stanley, shares their household and backs up all Mr Stanley’s views. Of course it is expected that Ann Veronica will marry and settle down as a housewife. Already a student of biology at London University, Ann Veronica longs for more personal freedom. As she complains early in the novel “Apparently I’m not to exist yet. I’m not to study, I’m not to grow. I’ve got to stay at home and remain in a state of suspended animation.” (Chapter 2).

A big argument comes over a relatively trivial matter. Mr Stanley will not let Ann Veronica go to a fancy-dress dance as he believes the hosts are raffish people with all the wrong too-modern ideas. Ann Veronica is humiliated that she cannot mix freely with people of her own age who are not under the same restraints as she is. After much agonising, she decides the only thing she can do is to run away from home, and make her own life as an independent woman in London. This she attempts, but she discovers it’s impossible for a single young woman to find a job that will pay a reasonable wage. So she borrows 40 pounds from Mr Ramage, a man in his fifties and with an invalid wife, who seems to be liberal-minded and a supporter of women’s emancipation.

Naturally Ann Veronica’s father and her severe aunt and her brother Roddy find out where she is lodging in London and come along to expostulate with her and make her see reason by coming home and being a good girl. There is also a Mr Manning, of roughly her own age, who attempts to woo her with marriage in mind. Hubert Manning is an aesthete of some sort and a would-be poet, clearly depicted as a shallow fool, not up to Ann Veronica’s own intellectual level, and with a sentimental and totally unrealistic view of the relationship of the sexes. When he speaks in too flowery a way, Ann Veronica ripostes “You men have, I know, meant to make us queens and goddesses, but in practice, well look for example, at the stream of girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap and underfed! They aren’t queens, and no one is treating them as queens. And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings… I was looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves – the women I saw. Worse than any men. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it another dreadful dingy woman – another fallen queen, I suppose – dingier than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!”  (Chapter 6)

So far, even if the terms of reference belong to an earlier age, the novel is convincing enough. Remember, Ann Veronica was written before women in Britain had the vote – or women in most countries outside New Zealand and some Australian and American states; when there were few opportunities for women to earn a decent wage; and when there were still restrictions on women owning property or filling public offices. The quarrels between Ann Veronica and her familiy are plausible as are Ann Veronica’s aspirations. The tendency for men to idealise women, but still to dominate them, is well depicted. Also, Wells does not overdo Ann Veronica’s mental resilience or confidence in herself. Some of his best writing is in Chapter 4, where Ann Veronica is for the first time alone in London and unsupported by her family. She experiences real fear as she walks the city streets, with Wells discreetly suggesting that men follow after her, assuming that a young woman unaccompanied must be a prostitute or at least available for sexual encounters.

But before half-way, something goes wrong with this novel. It is connected to the difficulty of a male writer writing sympathetically about a young woman’s experience, but in the process making many male assumptions and – knowingly or otherwise – turning the young woman into a sort of fantasy figure of male desire.

The problem begins with a Miss Miniver, who introduces Ann Veronica to the suffragette movement, but who is depicted as an hysterical crank. After Ann Veronica (a student biologist, remember) says that bodies are beautiful things, the suffragette Miss Miniver says “No, you are wrong! … Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him… Platonically… Absolutely Platonically. Soul to soul.” (Chapter 8) This is another unrealistic view of the relationship of the sexes. As Wells goes on to characterise them, the sufragettes have a laudable cause, but are single-minded extremists… and only sexual awakening will cure them.

As it happens, the 50-year-old Mr Ramage proves to be a fraud who gives only lip service to women’s emancipation and who was really looking to seduce Ann Veronica. He even suggests that his loan of 40 pounds was a down-payment on her body. Ann Veronica has to ward off rape with a smart ju-jitsu smack on his jaw. (Note – the real Amber Reeves had learnt ju-jitsu.) Ann Veronica is thus so disillusioned with men that for a while she follows Miss Miniver’s lead and becomes an ardent suffragette. She even joins a group who rush into the House of Commons and shout “Votes for Women”. She is arrested and spends some time in jail.

The way Wells reports this whole sequence of events is extemely ambiguous. On the one hand, his account of the raid on parliament is very vivid, as is his description of degrading prison conditions. At his best, he was a good storyteller. On the other hand, he has Ann Veronica coming to the conclusion that suffragettes, with all their bold rhetoric, are deluded as they appear to think that gaining the vote will at once create a new world and completely change conditions for women. One might see this as a reasonable refutation of Utopianism (mind you, H.G.Wells himself wrote a number of daffy Utopias in his time). There’s even an outside possibility that Wells was reflecting a real tension in the ranks of the suffragettes between heterosexual women who wanted the vote but still wanted to marry and have children; and – possibly lesbian – women who didn’t want a bar of men or wanted only “platonic” relations with them.

 But in the end, Wells seems to be steering Ann Veronica towards his idea of Free Love. Women will be truly emancipated not by gaining political power, but by becoming sexually enlightened. And in Wells’ view of things, sexual enlightenment for women means surrendering themselves to experienced older men who can initiate them into the wonders of sexual intercourse. In fact what young women really need is an informed and wise older man to direct them in their sexual blossoming. Someone like – um – H.G.Wells.

Most implausibly, after her connection with the suffragettes, Wells has Ann Veronica running back to suburban respectability and accepting the inane Hubert Manning’s offer of marriage. But before they wed, she finally drops Manning resolving thus “… she realized 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, than a child cares for the sawdust in its doll. She was the actress his whim had chosen to play a passive part.” (Chapter 13)

Yet what does Ann Veronica become in this novel if not a passive puppet? For Wells has introduced a character called Capes (Gosh! That name does sound similar to Wells!) who lectures in biology and is one of Ann Veronica’s teachers. He is, supposedly, her intellectual equal and worthy of her intellectual love. But he is older and more experienced than she. He has a frigid wife who refuses to give him a divorce. Capes is in his early thirties. Yes, in his thirties. Note how unlike that lecherous old beast Ramage he is. Ramage, who desired sexual intercourse with Ann Veronica, was in his fifties. Capes, who desires sexual intercourse with Ann Veronica, is only in his thirties, so that makes it more seemly. And note how, in his fictionalised version of himself, Wells neatly gets over the fact that he was older than that – in his early forties – when he took up with young Amber Reeves.

But I am wandering out of the novel. “I feel a mixture of beast and uncle” says Capes truthfully (in Chapter 14) as he begins to woo Ann Veronica in earnest. But his words win her, forced and theatrical though they seem to this reader. Who knows? Perhaps Wells wooed Amber with such words, in which case life does not measure up to art. They plan to abscond, unmarried to Switzerland for their “honeymoon”. As Ann Veronica prepares to flee from her family home for the second time, Wells remarks “She was at the end of girlhood and on the eve of a woman’s crowning experience.” (Chapter 15) That experience is, presumably, conjugation with a man. Switzerland is presented as a perfect wonderland in which Ann Veronica and Capes climb beautiful mountains, see beautiful vistas and make love frequently, this being Ann Veronica’s fulfilment.

And what does Capes do in these chapters? He lectures her and lectures her and lectures her on the nature of Free Love and sexuality and their emotional fulfilment. And she nods in agreement and says how she longs to have many children. Marriage can be a fine thing, but there is no real sense that this is the meeting of equals. Haven’t we, dear reader, really seen a young woman falling into the thrall of an older man as opposed to a young woman finding her freedom, which is what Ann Veronica was seeking at the opening of this novel? A work that began by claiming to represent a young woman’s sensibility ends up as a man’s-eye-view.

To add insult to injury, Wells tacks on a final “happy ending” chapter where it is four years later, Capes and Ann Veronica are respectably married, Veronica delights in her bonny baby and she is reconciled to her father and her aunt. Ah, domestic bliss! Ah, sweet conventionality!

Some years ago, the Guardian used to have a column called “Digested Classics” wherein well-known novels were summarised in satirical terms. In the Guardian issue of 26 March 2010 appeared John Crace’s parody of Ann Veronica.

After her connection with suffragettes, Crace has Ann Veronica running back to Capes saying “I have become the right kind of feminist. The kind acceptable to a man.” And in the closing scene of domestic bliss, Capes says to Ann Veronica “Now be a good girl and make us a cuppa.” To me this seems a fair summary of how the novel develops and where it goes wrong.

 

Pedantic Footnote: Just for bibilographic interest, please note that in Ann Veronica, H.G.Wells uses one trope that was already well-worn before he got to it. The older married man Ramage at one point takes Ann Veronica to a performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde,  about adulterous love, in the hope of seducing her. On this blog alone, you will find comments on three earlier books by other authors which use this device of events on stage being connected with impulses in the lives of the novel’s main characters. In Zola’s La Curee , incestuous lovers see Racine’s Phedre about the incestuous desire of a stepmother for her step-son. In Eca de Queiroz’s Cousin Bazilio, there is a visit to the theatre where events in a melodrama echo the turbulent passions of characters in the audience. And in de Maupassant’s Fort Comme La Mort, an older man goes to Gounod’s opera Faust, sees in the audience the younger woman for whom he longs, and shares Faust’s desire to be young again. I am sure that some Ph.D. student somewhere has found many more examples of this narrative device.

Eccentric Footnote: Ann Veronica has been dramatised a number of times on stage and on BBC television and was turned into a not-very-successful musical in 1969. Wikipedia tells me that the Disney Corporation have plans to make it into a movie, to be written and directed by the Coen Brothers. Goodness knows where that combination will lead, but I don’t for one moment think it will actually follow the very compromised nature of Wells’s novel.