‘Cooped up!’ he cried. ‘Did I stand in the way of your going to college? Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You’ve got a bicycle!’
(Ann Veronica’s father explaining how liberal he’s been with her, page 22)
‘Ann Veronica’ is not, alas, an out-and-out comedy like ‘Mr Polly’. It is one of Wells’s first novels of ideas, the idea in this case being The New Woman, an ‘issue’ which is explored via a number of characters and situations.
The basic premise is simple enough. Ann Veronica Stanley is 21-and-a-half, the clever daughter of an upper middle-class widower. Her four older siblings have all left home and so she lives alone with her father and his sister, Aunt Mollie (aka Miss Stanley), in Morningside Park, an outlying suburb of London, something like New Malden, on the Wimbledon railway line.
Ann has had all the advantages in life that the protagonists of the social comedies (Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Mr Polly) distinctly lacked. She did excellently at school and wanted to study at Cambridge but her father refused to let her, claiming advanced study ‘unsexed’ a woman. After a lot of arguing she got a place at Tredgold Women’s College studying Biology. Understandably, she chafes against the restrictions put on her life by her father and Aunt Mollie, who both agree that Ann is too young, naive and inexperienced to be given greater freedoms.
The narrative opens when she has been invited to a fancy dress ball and to stay overnight in a hotel in London with student friends, and her father categorically forbids her to do so.
Wells sympathetically if critically depicts the characters of this father and the even more straitlaced aunt, he still hurting from the death of his beloved wife when Ann was just thirteen, the aunt engaged to a curate who died before they married – so both of them damaged by life and aware of the pain and unhappiness it can bring, something Ann has almost no idea of. By their own lights they’re trying to protect her.
The characters could be laid out in a mind map with Ann at the centre.
Peter Stanley – ‘a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair, gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the crown of his head’.
Aunt Mollie – Peter’s sister, at one stage engaged to a curate who died, so when Peter’s wife died, she came to live with him and look after the children.
Ann’s two sisters: the eldest, Alice, married a doctor, removed to Scotland, had lots of children and became a boring adult. Wells gives us an extended description of her wedding and wedding breakfast as seen through the child Ann’s eyes (having just read the wedding scene in Mr Polly made me think Wells has a thing for weddings).
The other sister, Gwen, ran off and married an actor, Mr Fortescue, such a shameful act that Father disowned her and when, in a few years, they started to receive letters asking for a reconciliation and then begging for money, refused to answer.
Attached to her father is a handful of business acquaintances of other male professional occupants of the snooty Avenue they live in and who he has nodding acquaintance with on the daily train up to London: Mr Ramage who Ann chats to on the train and finds her grown-up and intelligent, later revealed to be a sensualist and a libertine (p.58) and then a virtual rapist (pages 143 to 151); and Ogilvy who he lunches with at the Legal Club. Both echo and reinforce father’s fulminations about ‘young people today’, and listen to his (comic) hobby horse that it’s all the fault of modern novelists.
Attached to Aunt Mollie are two grand lady neighbours in the Avenue:
Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly related to Aunt Mollie’s deceased curate. She was the social leader of Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs Pramlay, a sister of the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen’s Aid Society.
Connected to these ladies is a Mr Hubert Manning, a 35-year-old civil servant and poet who keeps buttonholing Ann at the ladies’ garden parties. Ann can see the other guests looking at them and gossiping and realises that many consider him a very eligible catch, a pressganging she resents. With his minor poet hat on, Manning also represents another type which is the sexist man who insists on placing women on a pedestal, making them goddesses who should never descend into the sordid worlds of work or politics i.e. trapping them in a gilded cage.
In another direction, Ann is good friends with the Widgett family:
Mr. Widgett was a journalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and ‘art’ brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station. He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the High School…
It’s these two girls, Hetty and Constance who attend the Fadden Art School where the annual party is going to be, and who’ve invited Ann to go with them and stay overnight at the hotel with. Coming from an arty family, they hold ‘advanced’ views, i.e. are schoolgirl bohemians. They have a brother, Teddy, raised in a household of sisters and so ‘broken in to feminine society’, who nurses a puppy-like infatuation with Ann.
In an early chapter, when Ann goes round to complain about her father’s unreasonable attitude, in Hetty Widgett’s bedroom, there is also present slim, 30-year-old Miss Miniver who wears a lapel button reading VOTES FOR WOMEN and is given hard core feminist speeches which almost feel like they’ve been copied out of actual suffragette tracts:
Mrs Miniver’s beliefs
According to Miss Miniver, Women are victims of a patriarchy which runs everything and controls every aspect of their lives. The professions are all closed to women who have almost no employment opportunities (except being typists, teachers or writers) and so are trapped at home with their families, languishing until they can be married off to a suitable man. So millions of women rush rashly into marriage only to discover they have swapped prison for slavery. The only real way to get on in life is by ‘pleasing men’ who are brought up to regard women as a kind of expensive toy. ‘Women have no economic freedom because they have no political freedom.’ Hence her impassioned belief that nothing will change until women get the vote and therefore almost any crime is worth committing in order to liberate half the human race.
A final thought is that ancient society was a matriarchy, in fact going back into the animal forebears of humanity the female of the species plays the fundamental role of reproducing and males had to compete for the privilege of mating with them.
‘Among human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts. The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate! The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told.’
Somehow, somewhere along the line, however, the female of Homo sapiens has been conned and hoodwinked into oppression…
‘Only in man is the male made the most important. And that happens through our maternity; it’s our very importance that degrades us.’
My beliefs
As you know, I’m a Darwinian materialist, unimpressed by most of humanity’s claims to superiority, astonished at fatuous conversations about ‘morality’, more impressed by our ability to enslave and kill each other and our current efforts to destroy the planet we live on.
Seen from this unsentimental perspective the truest thing Miss Miniver says is that ‘Maternity has been our undoing.’ Yes. Women are designed to bear and raise children and a certain proportion of women, throughout history, have apparently hated this plight. Men are designed to fight for territory, resources, kudos, and secure a safe habitat in which their woman or women can raise their children, and so many men have been killed in humanity’s endless wars. As far as we can tell, from all the historical records we have, this appears to have been the practice of humanity certainly since the birth of agriculture and cities, some 10,000 years ago. Miss Miniver acknowledges it without accepting that it might be the fundamental bedrock explanation for the situation she deplores and, if so, very difficult to budge. Instead she turns it into a cartoon, a theatrical stunt.
‘While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it.’
In fact the central focus of the entire novel is yet another proof of the centrality of reproduction in human affairs: Amazing how central the ‘love story’ is to the novel and to popular entertainment generally, in our day dominating pop music, movies, TV dramas and adverts. From my heavily biological point of view, this is simply explainable because the search for a mate with whom to make a nest and raise young is the prime aim of humans’ existence as of every other animals’. It is entirely predictable that these biological drives will be the central theme of virtually our entire ‘culture’. They’re certainly the central theme of all the ‘literature’ I’ve been reading. The struggle to find a mate, and the multiple mishaps and occasional disasters it triggers, is central to the Edwardian fiction I’ve been reading, to Wells’s social novels, to all E.M. Forster and to D.H. Lawrence. The struggle for money i.e. security, is central to the Agatha Christie novel I just read. It’s hard to find a TV show or movie in which the there isn’t a male and female lead who, the audience know right from the start, are destined to ‘fall in love’ i.e. pair off and mate. All of pop music is about it. Once you think clearly about this motif you realise it’s everywhere and underpins a vast amount of our contemporary and past culture.
Which is why Mrs Miniver simply wishing it wasn’t so, or her specific belief that passing this or that law in Parliament will somehow change the fundamental constitution of the human race works in the fiction, was probably admirable at the time, but looks like a tiny wave lapping against the Antarctic ice shelf in the perspective of biology and deep history.
Miss Garvice’s beliefs
Incidentally, Miss Miniver has an opposite in the novel, a Miss Garvice, ‘a tall and graceful girl of distinguished intellectual incompetence, in whom the hostess instinct seemed to be abnormally developed’. She’s one of the nine students at Imperial College who Ann meets when she returns to study there in the second half of the novel and she is against the suffragettes. She believes that ‘women lost something infinitely precious by mingling in the conflicts of life’ and:
Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used at every discussion, her contribution to the great question. She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of life—their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their children fine and splendid. ‘Women should understand men’s affairs, perhaps,’ said Miss Garvice, ‘but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise now.’ (p.155)
Regardless of this as an opinion, the real point is the care with which Wells creates characters to cover off all points of view in this novel of ideas.
The plot
As you can maybe see from this summary of the dramatis personae, Ann Veronica is less a novel than a mechanism for the bringing together of a number of points of view dressed up as characters. It is designed to bring onto the stage a series of issues, and subsidiary topics, which Wells wishes to investigate, describe or discuss.
So Ann’s argument with her father about whether she can go to a fancy dress ball escalates to her being dressed up and ready to go but them actually fighting at the front door to open it. Dad wins and sends her back to her room in a rage. There’s a comic scene where she tries to climb down the drainpipe but discovers it’s not as easy to do that as a grown woman wearing fancy dress and a big cloak as it was when she was a little girl of 6 and she’s forced to spend the night in her room fuming. (It’s the kind of small psychological detail Wells captures so well, when he has her do a little dance of rage and frustration.)
Ann runs away to London
Next day, with the help of the Widgett friends, she packs a bag, smuggles it out of the house, strolls along to the station, and runs away to London. She takes a room in a cheap hotel and writes a letter to her father explaining that she’s stifling to death and needs to start a new life.
London disillusion
However, London is not all she expects. Wells writes a tour de force passage describing one long day in London, which starts with Ann arriving at Waterloo station early in the morning and experiencing a great feeling of light and space and freedom, but as the day progresses and she trudges the streets and stumbles into dirty slums thronging with very dodgy looking people, her mood drops and then, as dusk falls, she becomes aware of the sexual menace on the streets: she realises a lot of the women she’s walked past are prostitutes but, much worse, she herself is propositioned in a furtive way, by fairly decent looking men, in Piccadilly, in Mayfair, and then she’s pursued by, in effect a stalker (pages 69 to 75).
This is a) vividly and powerfully written b) fascinating because being followed, harassed and propositioned (‘the pursuit of the undesired, persistent male’) is still a highly publicised problem for women in public places today, 115 years later…
(The lost wandering through a world of vice reminded me of Dorian’s wanderings in the East End in chapter 7 of The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
People try to persuade her to return
Eventually she makes it safe and sound back to her lodgings where, over the following days, she receives a series of deputations – her father, her aunt, her brother Roddy, Mr Manning – all, in their different ways, arguing that she should go home and place herself back under her father’s supervision, a recurring theme being the social shame and stigma she’ll bring down on the family:
‘Think of what people will say!’ That became a refrain. ‘Think of what Lady Palsworthy will say! Think of what’ – So-and-so – ‘will say! What are we to tell people?… And what will Mr. Manning think?’
But she rejects them all:
‘I don’t care what any one thinks,’ said Ann Veronica. (p.83)
She is determined to start a new life. After a climactic confrontation, her father disowns her just as he disowned her disgraced sister Gwen, and exits the drawing room in the dingy hotel where she’s staying.
Mr Manning turns up and spouts his patronising view about women being Angels and Queens who the likes of him want to serve (he has, I forgot to mention, written her a long letter proposing marriage, which Ann spent a lot of time composing a calm negative reply to). She gives this Victorian bunkum short shrift.
Satire on the Fabians and ‘advanced thought’
Ann’s feminist contact, Miss Miniver, takes her to various meetings of progressives groups and societies. First a small tea party for eccentric followers of the Fabian Society:
Everybody seemed greatly concerned about the sincerity of Tolstoy. Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in Tolstoy’s sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter much any more. (p.100)
Then onto an actual grand meeting featuring the leading Fabians themselves. Now Wells was himself a prominent member of the Fabians alongside George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and many more. He refers to the others by name but gives himself the alias of ‘Mr Wilkins’. They are portrayed as fussy, high-minded, unfocused and utterly impractical. But the same goes for all the other progressive societies Miss Miniver takes Ann to, the Dress Reform Association and the Food Reform Exhibition, the Socialists and, of course, the Suffragettes. Everywhere she goes she finds high-minded people making grand speeches about how The Great Change is just around the corner, even if they all appear to want subtly different things and no-one gives any details about how the great change is going to come about. What emerges from the confusion of high-minded rhetoric is the notion that somehow, progressive or ‘advanced’ people will change the world by setting an example which all the rest of the population will be inspired to follow because of its rectitude and purity.
This implication, not only that the world was in some stupid and even obvious way WRONG, with which indeed she was quite prepared to agree, but that it needed only a few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately ‘advanced,’ for the new order to achieve itself.
An immense emphasis on thorough-going purity of mind and body, which explains why so many were vegetarians or even vegans, and also why, although there was a ‘free love’ wing of ‘advanced’ thought, there were also many who were more strict in their morals than the Victorians, rejecting Victorian sexual hypocrisy (i.e. men could do anything as long as respectable appearances were maintained).
The more she enters into Miss Miniver’s world, the more Ann can see how all these groups feel they are trembling on the brink of some great change and yet, the more futile she realises their efforts are.
It did seem germane to the matter that so many of the people “in the van” were plain people, or faded people, or tired-looking people. It did affect the business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in their manners and inconsistent in their phrases. There were moments when she doubted whether the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the glamour of its own assertion.
Ann ran away from her father to gain independence, agency and self respect,
but when she heard Miss Miniver discoursing on the next step in the suffrage campaign, or read of women badgering Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or getting up in a public meeting to pipe out a demand for votes and be carried out kicking and screaming, her soul revolted. She could not part with dignity. Something as yet unformulated within her kept her estranged from all these practical aspects of her beliefs.
Ann takes a loan from Ramage
Meanwhile reality bites. Funds are running low and she discovers how little you get by pawning belongings. She goes to see nice Mr Ramage, who she met out walking and seemed so supportive, at his office. Ramage is solicitousness itself. His clerks smirk and nod when he escorts her past them out to lunch. We are left in no doubt that he is a predatory lecher and, behind his oily sympathy, he considers Ann a fine young woman to add to his list of conquests. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Wells tries to describe that odd aspect of female psychology which is that Ann senses she is being sized up but refuses to acknowledge or accept it. The result is she goes along with his invitations and plans and he, as a predator, knows exactly how to manage this kind of feminine self deception.
Anyway he runs down her employment prospects, which are very limited – does she want to become a typist? – and in the meantime offers a loan of £40 which, after some hesitation, she accepts. This, the reader understands, is all part of his powerplay but it suits her, too.
Ann resumes her study of biology
In contrast to the confused demands of suffragettes, vegetarians, socialists and the rest of them, is the calm cool biology rooms at the Central Imperial College where Ann resumes her study thanks to Ramage’s loan. Here every single element is subsumed to one purpose, to investigate the forms and structures of organic life. The leading figure in the place is a Mr Russell, a transparent pseudonym for Thomas Henry Huxley, who Wells studied under for a year in the 1890s. We don’t meet him just hear references.
The great figure of Russell, by the part he had played in the Darwinian controversies, and by the resolute effect of the grim-lipped, yellow, leonine face beneath the mane of silvery hair. (p.116)
Who the narrative does introduce us to is ‘Capes’, 32 or 3 years old, the fair-haired dissection demonstrator, who puts into practice the lessons of Russell’s daily lecture.
More advanced thought
Ann has been thrust into a world of ideas and movements. Among the many ideas she entertains the notion that the centre of a woman’s life is the problem of ‘love’ in a way it isn’t for men. She runs this by Miss Miniver who is disgusted and revolted, she espouses the high-minded puritanism of the movement, thinks men are disgusting beasts, thinks above all that sex is revolting disgusting filthy. That’s why she believes she and her people are ‘souls’, we are the pure, we are ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’ precisely because they have left the sordid realities of the body behind. If she ever falls in love it will be utterly Platonic love.
‘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’ — her voice dropped again — ‘platonically.’ She made her glasses glint. ‘Absolutely platonically,’ she said.
(It’s the glinting glasses which make this so delicious, with its associations with hardness and inflexibility, dryness and sterility and, indeed, Miss Miniver is thin and wizened, not plump and procreative (unlike Flo in Mr Polly).)
The centrality of the reproductive function is forced on Ann because of her studies in biology, and the daily lectures from Darwin disciple Russel-Huxley, which harp on the central mechanism of evolution, namelyf reproduction with variation, combined with the constant battle for resources, territory and mates.
A debate about beauty
In this context Ann is puzzled by the human sense of Beauty (the obsession of late-generation Arts and Crafts puritans like Miss Miniver). This highlights a central problem with the worldview of the ‘advanced’ thinkers portrayed in novels like this, which is its lack of thought: surely a sense of Beauty can be explained in hundreds of ways and in no sense contradicts evolutionary materialism.
1) Breeding Beauty in people is obviously based on the fundamentals of breeding and fitness: Beauty is obviously culturally determined but some things seem common, in people we look for height and symmetry, not fat, old or wrinkled, a certain smooth sheen – these are obviously all based on good breeding criteria.
2) Beauty products now, in 2024, more than ever before, emphasise people’s, generally women’s, secondary sexual characteristics, high heels to create a sense of long legs and push out the buttocks (fertility), lipstick and eyeliner (to mimic sexual arousal i.e. slightly swollen lips and enlarged pupils). Our liberated times have seen a steady increase in the amount of cosmetic surgery people of both sexes are prepared to pay for.
3) The beautiful game I’ve heard plenty of sports fans talk about a ‘beautiful’ goal, a ‘beautiful’ tackle, a ‘beautiful’ game and so on, obviously in a way which isn’t directly about art and aesthetics but an appreciation of grace and proficiency and accomplishment, and anyone can see the Darwinian reasoning behind us punters being attracted towards the tallest, most handsome, most agile or skilful members of the tribe. Towards winners in every sphere.
4) Art Only a small proportion of the population spend their time discussing beauty in the sense of art and aesthetics. In 1910 I wonder if you could quantify the percentage, 10%, 5%, 1%? of the population. Certainly all the characters in E.M. Forster’s novels, which I’ve just finished reading, but how many others? I think it’s safe to say they’re not subjects which interest most people.
5) Class It’s a class thing. For most of human history art has been associated with the ruling class and great wealth. Poorer people may have made and crafted beautiful things for themselves but in the galleries and museums of the world, most of the objects were created for the rich and for rich connoisseurs, for emperors and monarchs and their courtiers. Appreciation of, let alone possession of, works of art has only percolated down to the new middle classes in, when would you say, during the nineteenth century with its newly rich industrialists? So that by the later century colonies of artists living bohemian lives could be set up and copied across (northern) Europe, groups like the pre-Raphaelites could make more affordable art for each other, and by the 1900s a group like the Bloomsburies could make and promote each other’s relatively affordable art.
But my point is snobbery. Art has always been connected with snobbery. Rich people have known they ought to appreciate art even when they have no real feel for it and art appreciation has always mixed genuine understanding with raw aristocratic aloofness. Art has always been a way for people to show off and assert their wealth or, by extension their intellectual or spiritual ‘wealth’. Witness the competitive art snobbery skewered in novels like ‘A Room with A View’ or ‘Those Barren Leaves’, or the Biggleswick section of John Buchan’s novel Mr Standfast.
In a snobbish society like England, in a society where people still quietly show off their actual wealth, or their lovely homes or second homes, their Range Rover Discoveries, their lovely little place in the country – discussing art is just another way of showing off your class, your aboveness, your specialness..
6) Art for failures. Then we descend to the social status of people like Miss Miniver and the social ‘failures’ who throng meetings of the Fabians and vegetarian societies, who’ve failed in the various obvious markers of social success (money, breeding, good family, big houses etc) but salvage their self respect with the delusory thought that they are:
a) more ‘advanced’ in their thinking about society, and thus helping to bring about the New World
b) have failed in conventional terms because they have devoted themselves to Art and the finer things in life
Thus endless, witless talk about Art and Beauty can be entirely empty of content but serve the main purpose of making the talkers feel better and giving them a spurious sense of superiority in a relentlessly competitive acquisitive society. (Compare and contrast Mrs Miniver with the character Aunt Juley in E.M. Forster’s Howards End, who is a leading figure in the Art and Literature societies of Swanage.)
Off the top of my head, those are just six ways the notion of ‘Beauty’ can be reconciled with an entirely Darwinian, materialist, sociological view of human beings and (western) society.
Ann falls in love with Capes
Anyway, thoughts of biology, burgeoning thoughts of love, exploring new ideas new freedoms, all these new sensations (unfortunately) become tangled up in Ann realising that she is falling in love with Capes the demonstrator in the lab. He is older and taller than her (tick), experienced and knowledgeable (tick), a deft demonstrator and patient explainer (tick), a good writer in the articles he’s published (tick), an all-round firm, fit love-object for a young, inexperienced, rather scared and insolvent women like Ann.
It’s disappointing. I was hoping Ann’s rebellion against the patriarchy, her exposure to all kinds of movements for social change, these would lead up to something interesting. Instead…she falls in love with an older man.
Back to discussions of ‘Beauty’ because Wells has Ann directly associate ‘beauty’ with sexual desirability which is, in my view, based on the primal need to mate.
She became aware of the modelling of his ear, of the muscles of his neck and the textures of the hair that came off his brow, the soft minute curve of eyelid that she could just see beyond his brow; she perceived all these familiar objects as though they were acutely beautiful things. They WERE, she realized, acutely beautiful things. Her sense followed the shoulders under his coat, down to where his flexible, sensitive-looking hand rested lightly upon the table. She felt him as something solid and strong and trustworthy beyond measure. The perception of him flooded her being. (p.130)
There now follow pages of her worries and anxieties and thoughts and lying awake at night while various bits of her mind try to reconcile themselves to the extremely situation which is that she wants Cape to make her his mate. Obviously she doesn’t put it like that because people don’t, people conceal the facts, the blunt facts of life behind thousands of years of guff about ‘love’.
The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica’s mind, and altered the quality of all its topics…
We’re half way through the novel and we now enter the fuzzy world of love thought. It’s a moot point how much of this has ever been believed by any woman or is male projection or is Wells’s idea of what a young woman thinks.
She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too remained unconscious of herself. To think of him as loving her would make all that different. Then he would turn his face to her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes. She would become defensive—what she did would be the thing that mattered. He would require things of her, and she would be passionately concerned to meet his requirements.
Ramage assaults Ann
But then Ramage takes her out for an expensive dinner and on to the opera. Is it a form of sexism or misogyny or projection, or is it a plausible bit of novel writing, that Wells portrays Ann as being in radical denial of her relationship with Ramage, brushing under the carpet and repressing and ignoring every hint of a suggestion that he is seducing her and softening her up to become his mistress. She is depicted as knowing it but refusing to know it. Anyway the reader knows it so Wells is peering over the head of his characters and winking at us.
Ramage takes Ann to dinner with champagne and then onto the opera which is Tristan and Isolde, one of the great love operas, and when she comes back to her senses from being whirled away by the music, she discovers Ramage has his hand round her waist. All through dinner they discussed love and Ann thought she was having an abstract discussion and was also trying to conceal her love for Capes. She didn’t realise Ramage was making an increasingly obvious play for her.
When he finally bursts out that he loves her, worships the ground she walks on, will do anything for her, needs her, wants her etc etc, and she tries to tug her hand away and says in an urgent whisper, ‘Not here, not now, please stop talking like this’, I felt embarrassed, for them, for Wells, for the millions of men and women who have acted out the same pathetic scene, and for myself for reading this tripe. How many novels have been written about ‘love’, God help us.
The only flicker of interest is that Wells shows us just as much of Ramage, and his dialogue, to grasp what kind of man he is, but mostly the interior of Ann’s head with its immense capacity for repression (of what men are like) and self-deception (about what Ramage wants) and refuge in the threadbare phrases of the reluctant woman in this situation (‘Please. No. Not here’ etc).
Despite all this, the very next night when he begs to see her, Ann foolishly agrees. Ramage takes her to a secluded restaurant where he’s arranged a private room, with a sofa, and after dinner chatting about Wagner, closes and locks the door. It is obviously a seduction in the French manner but Ann, all unwary, doesn’t realise it, at least she doesn’t acknowledge to herself what might be happening. At least Wells tells us she isn’t acknowledging it.
At least when Ramage makes his move, grabs her and starts kissing her, Ann has had the benefit of a good education, including hockey and (Wells must have chuckled) ju-jitsu, so that she is able to punch Ramage very hard under the chin and he lets her go and staggers back. Good for her! Creepy old geezer.
Ramage’s theory of male entitlement
Ramage staggers back, they both regroup, and then he makes his position unmistakably clear. He regards the £40 he gave her not as a loan between friends but a payment upon which she became his mistress.
‘You’re mine. I’ve paid for you and helped you, and I’m going to conquer you somehow—if I have to break you to do it.’ (p.148)
When he took her for expensive meals, to the opera and then to a private room in a hotel, did she not realise these are the accepted and conventional steps towards her becoming his mistress? Of course, Ann doesn’t, because nobody has told her about this. Endless books and poems and vapid discussions of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Love’ – not one word from anyone in her life about how to handle a middle-aged man who wants to make her his mistress.
After more in the same vein, Ramage finally unlocks the door and lets her leave, and she staggers back to her lodgings, stunned. Wells is novelist enough to give Ann mixed and confused feelings about all this. She is a clever, curious if naive young woman with a scientific bent and so at first she is interested in what has taken place, it stirs up not only feelings but thoughts. Only as the evening wears on does she have an emotional reaction and start to feel disgusted and defiled, furiously trying to wipe away the feel of Ramage’s lips on hers. Nobody has ever kissed her on the lips before.
Ann’s rage against a man’s world
And she processes this into sweeping realisations about the position of women in a man’s world:
Ramage 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 the love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled. (p.150)
And:
For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman’s position in the world — the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labour for even a foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father’s support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And here she was — in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. (p.153)
Ann sends Ramage’s money back
Anne goes to the post office and discovers she’s spent nearly £20 of the £40 loan. She scrapes together all the cash she can and posts it to Ramage with a promise to repay the rest. A day or so later she receives a letter back and she barely even reads the first sentence from Ramage before, in disgust, throwing it into the fire. Unfortunately it contains the £20 and before she can get it out again, the money has been burned. Well, that was stupid.
Married
From one of her fellow students at the college she receives the devastating news that Capes is married. Separated now but not actually divorced. This staggers her plans for love. (p.158)
Joining the suffragettes
The more she thinks about it the more infuriated Ann is at being trapped and cabined in a man’s world (‘savage wrath’). Also she needs a job. So she plucks up the courage to visit the suffragettes recruiting office, where she asks the usual starter questions and is shown the usual replies. Her main one is that women are economically subservient to and dependent on men, how will getting the vote change that. It’ll be a decisive start, is the reply (p.165).
There was something holding women down, holding women back, and if it wasn’t exactly man-made law, man-made law was an aspect of it.
The woman interviewing her, Miss Brett, is given quite an effective speech:
‘Oh! please don’t lose yourself in a wilderness of secondary considerations,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to tell you all that women can do, all that women can be. There is a new life, different from the old life of dependence, possible. If only we are not divided. If only we work together. This is the one movement that brings women of different classes together for a common purpose. If you could see how it gives them souls, women who have taken things for granted, who have given themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity….’
The attack on Westminster
She is recruited into a squad which is sent that evening to be smuggled into Old Palace Yard from where they are to make a dash into the Palace of Westminster and try to make it through to the chamber of the House of Commons, yelling Votes for Women all the way. She is quickly intercepted, as are her comrades, by burly policemen who initially try to shoo her away but when she persists, and repeatedly strikes a copper, an inspector on horseback says she’ll have to be arrested.
According to Sylvia Hardy’s notes in the 1993 Everyman paperback edition I read, this attack on the Palace of Westminster was closely modelled on an attack carried out by the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union (WSPU) on 11 February 1908.
Ann in prison (for one month)
Wells describes the process of being held pending trial, then hustled in front of an exasperated judge who delivers the same speech as he’s given the other women before giving her a choice between being bound over to keep the peace for £40 or going to prison for a month. Since she doesn’t have any money she doesn’t have much choice.
She had vague visions of prisons as sterile houses of reform. This one is filthy. Her clothes are taken away, she’s washed in dirty water then made to put on dirty clothes reeking of their previous owner. Prison wears her down. The other inmates are scary, the food is dire, there is no privacy.
She tries to pray but knows she doesn’t have a religious bone in her body. She fantasises about Capes. She begins to repent. It dawns on her that all her behaviour has been privileged and self centred. She has made her father, aunt, brother, Teddy, Mr Manning, and Ramage unhappy and her, is she any happier? Has she discovered freedom?
She writes a letter to father asking to be forbidden and allowed to come home.
Ann returns home
Daddy relents. Aunt Mollie meets her as she leaves Canongate prison (though there is farcical comedy as both get caught up in other suffragettes being released and find themselves being hustled along to a vegetarian restaurant to take part in celebrations. It is 6 months since she ran away, 5 + 1 in prison.
The welcome home interview with her father is very frosty. She apologises. She admits to having debts but can only bring herself to mention £15 and says she borrowed from the Widgetts – telling the truth about Ramage would lead to terrible revelations.
Father even lets her resume her studies at Imperial, so no conflict there. If that had been chosen as the battleground, it would have been a bigger, more serious novel. As it was, making the trigger for her running away attendance at a fancy dress party a) makes it seem trivial and b) easy for all sides to forgive and forget.
Back at the lab
She returns to the college to find herself a heroine. Miss Klegg embraces her and shares her own determination to go to prison soon. (There’s a hint, I think, that Miss Klegg is a lesbian with a pash for Ann, p.196). Even the sceptical Miss Garvice is swayed. But most important of all is lovely Mr Capes who apologises for mocking her beliefs slightly at the last afternoon tea they all had before she went off. Everything is settled everything is happy – except she still owes Ramage and has no way of paying.
Ann gets engaged to Manning
Inexplicably – she gets engaged to her tall, mild, well-meaning fan Mr Manning. This is because, in a twisted way, she knows she loves Capes and wants to remain friends with him. When she shows Capes her engagement ring he is understandably thunderstruck.
This seems like a ludicrous development, conjured up solely to keep the plot going for another 60 pages. It doesn’t seem very like Ann though admittedly she has a wilful side. In fact what it reminds me of is of Mr Polly making his panic-stricken choice of the Larkins sisters to marry in The History of Mr Polly, the exact same sense of the character looking over the brink and diving in anyway.
Anyway, after a few pages of Mr Manning being wonderfully charming and chivalrous and promising to dedicate his life to her happiness and so on she realises he’s not listening to a word she says and she’s just a mannequin for him to hang his fine sentiments on and so she nerves herself, after a few weeks, to tell him flat, over strawberries and cream, that not only does she not love him, but that she loves another.
Manning takes this like he takes everything else about her with dramatic chivalrous sentiments, and refuses to stop adoring her, but in Ann’s mind it’s over. It’s not mentioned that she gave him his engagement ring back, presumably.
Ann declares to Capes
Having rolled back on her huge blunder of accepting Manning, Ann now has to negotiate declaring her feelings for Capes. This is more complicated and frustrating than you or I would imagine because of the Edwardian sensibilities around his marriage. After much stumbling she manages to spit it out one day in the lab and then they go for a long walk (he walks her to Waterloo station) to discuss.
Capes’s sexless marriage and affair
Capes tells Ann the story of his marriage which is that the beautiful wife he married young was (I think he’s saying) sexually reluctant or frigid, so that he had to discipline himself to a life of abnegation. Which explains why he fell in love with the wife of a good friend, who reciprocated his (sexual) passion. Here’s the passage in full so you can see how heavily it is censored and blunted, the characters themselves unable to be explicit. It’s a fascinating indication of how even two people in love, trying to be absolutely honest with each other, could not (apparently) bring themselves to be completely clear and explicit on these matters. (Or, is it an indication of the censorship applying to novels, and so an indication of the crippling constrictions placed on fiction?)
‘I married pretty young,’ said Capes. ‘I’ve got—I have to tell you this to make myself clear—a streak of ardent animal in my composition. I married—I married a woman whom I still think one of the most beautiful persons in the world. She is a year or so older than I am, and she is, well, of a very serene and proud and dignified temperament. If you met her you would, I am certain, think her as fine as I do. She has never done a really ignoble thing that I know of—never. I met her when we were both very young, as young as you are. I loved her and made love to her, and I don’t think she quite loved me back in the same way.’
He paused for a time. Ann Veronica said nothing.
‘These are the sort of things that aren’t supposed to happen. They leave them out of novels—these incompatibilities. Young people ignore them until they find themselves up against them. My wife doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand now. She despises me, I suppose…. We married, and for a time we were happy. She was fine and tender. I worshipped her and subdued myself.’
He left off abruptly. ‘Do you understand what I am talking about? It’s no good if you don’t.’
‘I think so,’ said Ann Veronica, and coloured. ‘In fact, yes, I do.’
‘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.’
‘That’s the comfort of you. Well, after a time there came a fever in my blood. Don’t think it was anything better than fever—or a bit beautiful. It wasn’t. Quite soon, after we were married—it was just within a year—I formed a friendship with the wife of a friend, a woman eight years older than myself…. It wasn’t anything splendid, you know. It was just a shabby, stupid, furtive business that began between us. Like stealing. We dressed it in a little music…. I want you to understand clearly that I was indebted to the man in many small ways. I was mean to him…. It was the gratification of an immense necessity. We were two people with a craving. We felt like thieves. We WERE thieves…’ (p.218)
It was this inability of fiction and its characters to spit it out, to say what they meant, that it’s my understanding that D.H. Lawrence set out to address, in the process breaking the obscenity laws and eventually going into exile from a country so determined to censor the simple facts of sex and desire.
Back to the plot: they were found out and his wife demanded a separation but refused (as punishment?) to divorce him.
This explains why, although Wells shows us at least one scene which makes it perfectly clear that Capes is himself very much in love with Ann, he has, in the laboratory, been deliberately cool and standoffish toward her – because he knows that if she gets involved with him it will be difficult. So his coolness stems from chivalry and consideration for her. And this goes so far that he is cross with her for telling him she loves him. If she hadn’t, they could have gone on being good friends indefinitely. But now they have to do something about it.
He wants her to be quite clear that they won’t be allowed to be lovers in their society, in London. She can’t become the mistress of a married man. They’ll have to go away. He’ll have to chuck his job at the laboratory. She’ll have to pack in her studies. They’ll be poor. To which Ann says:
‘I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want to give myself to you. I want to be whatever I can to you.’ (p.220)
Again and again she reiterates that she places herself entirely in his hands. A week later he comes to her in the laboratory and says Now, Let’s go now, Let’s run away together. I’ve always fancies myself as a writer. I’ll chuck being a lab demonstrator and you’ll chuck being a student and we’ll run away together.’
They plan it for the end of that session or term. There’s lots of detail but the long and short of it is that they elope to Switzerland and spend the last 20 pages of the book climbing amid the beautiful scenery, telling each other how wonderful they are.
It’s a bitter disappointment that this book about a headstrong young woman who is continually infuriated at the man’s world which traps and limits her, in the end finds fulfilment in ‘a woman’s crowning experience’ of running off with the man of her dreams:
- on a cultural level, falling back on the terrible tired old trap of defining herself by her relationship with a man
- in their speech, falling back on terrible clichés about love beauty
- on the biological level which I’m interested in, relapsing into being just another female animal finding its mate, looking up into his masterful face with lovelorn eyes, and talking about all the children she’s going to have (p.247)
What a letdown.
Capes delivers a manifesto on human nature, morality etc
Wells’s normal publisher turned the book down citing its immorality and it was damned by contemporary reviewers for the same reason. This was not only because of the immorality of the ending (young girl runs off with married man) but because the last 20 pages or so consist of them pondering and discussing their actions. And the point is that although they know what they’re doing is ‘wrong’, by the lights of social convention and morality and decency etc etc, nonetheless Capes, in particular, sets out to undermine all those conventions in a piece of sustained philosophising. It turns into a collection of anti-conventional or anti-social arguments:
– He claims there is an ‘instinct of rebellion’ which makes young people rebel against their parents – also thought of as a ‘home-leaving instinct’
– He doesn’t believe there’s a strong natural affection between parents and children; on the contrary, there is a ‘child -expelling instinct’, and he goes full throttle:
‘There’s no family uniting instinct, anyhow; it’s habit and sentiment and material convenience which hold families together after adolescence. There’s always friction, conflict, unwilling concessions. Always! I don’t believe there is any strong natural affection at all between parents and growing-up children. There wasn’t, I know, between myself and my father. I didn’t allow myself to see things as they were in those days; now I do. I bored him. I hated him…There are sentimental and traditional deferences and reverences, I know, between father and son; but that’s just exactly what prevents the development of an easy friendship. Father-worshipping sons are abnormal—and they’re no good. No good at all. One’s got to be a better man than one’s father, or what is the good of successive generations? Life is rebellion, or nothing.’
Capes continues, hoping for a time when the world faces the facts of human behaviour and doesn’t repress it, when the young won’t need to rebel ‘against customs and laws’, when both young and old generation are honest about their feelings, face the facts and so liberate themselves.
– And then he has a go at God and the notion of a supervising power or destiny:
It’s not a bit of good pretending there’s any Higher Truth or wonderful principle in this business. There isn’t… It was just a chance that we in particular hit against each other—nothing predestined about it. We just hit against each other, and here we are flying off at a tangent, a little surprised at what we are doing, all our principles abandoned, and tremendously and quite unreasonably proud of ourselves. (p.238)
– And then proceeds to give a biological or scientific justification for people doing as they please:
‘Men and women are not established things; they’re experiments, all of them. Every human being is a new thing, exists to do new things. Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good; if you die, well and good. Your purpose is done…’
No God. No morality. No family love. Instead, children in eternal rebellion against their parents. Individuals rebelling against society. People acting on impulse just as it pleases them. Anarchy!
– That’s not all. Capes goes on to speculate that human life is made up of two opposing elements, morality and adventure. Morality tells you what is right but it’s the spirit of adventure which moves people to action. Society requires morality but the individual longs for adventure. It’s a permanent opposition. Morality only makes sense insofar as it has to restrain people who want the opposite. Which leads him to a stylish paradox which would also have enraged Edwardian moralists:
‘There’s no sense in morality, I suppose, unless you are fundamentally immoral.’
Reaction
Forget any problems with the ‘free love’ plot. Surely it was this manifesto against all their social conventions which offended the central pieties of Victorian and Edwardian morality.
Now I realise why Wells gave Ann’s father, Mr Peters, several opinions. He is made to virulently dislike the Russell character (based, as I mentioned, on T.H. Huxley) for his impious atheistical beliefs and here, in Cape’s manifesto, you can easily see why. Capes attacks absolutely everything Ann’s father believes in and stands for.
Secondly, and more humorously, Wells gives Mr Peters an obsessive dislike of modern novels, modern novels precisely like this one, full of subversive opinions and rebellious characters. So the narrative internalised its critics by attributing to one of its characters the criticisms Well knew they’d make of it.
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.’ (p.253)
But Wells couldn’t control his real-life critics and they uniformly castigated the book for its ‘immorality’.
Thoughts
I found it hard to read, probably out of boredom. It is a half-good novel on its chosen subject. Leaving to one side the imponderable question of whether Ann is or isn’t a believable portrait of a young Edwardian woman (how on earth would you judge or assess this?) it presents some very powerful spoken arguments against the terrible confinement and cramping of women during this period and dramatises these with enjoyable craft (I mean novelist’s skill) in the characters of the various men, from her controlling father to the weedy suitor Teddy, the outrageous semi-rapist Ramage who regards women as sex toys to the equally as controlling Tennysonian poet Manning who refuses to let a woman be anything but a mannequin on a pedestal.
But oh the falling-off of the ending. If he’d had the courage of his convictions, Wells would have had Ann say, ‘Blast all men’, realise her lesbian side and become an unapologetic devotee of not only suffagettism but other, maybe more important, women’s causes (changing women’s economic and legal positions etc).
Instead, he makes his heroine melt into ‘the strong embracing arms’ of her hero (p.226), ‘Capes, the magic man whose touch turned one to trembling fire’ (p.233) like the feeblest Victorian heroine. More than that, Wells paints her as becoming extremely, exaggeratedly submissive, with strong overtones of BDSM:
One of the things that most surprised him in her was her capacity for blind obedience. She loved to be told to do things… ‘I say,’ she reflected, ‘you are rather the master, you know.’ (p.242)
This feels completely out of kilter with everything we’ve learned about Ann in the preceding 240 pages and, what’s more, seems unpleasantly redolent of the master-servant flavour which Wells – according to his many lovers and biographers – deployed in his many real-life philandering relationships.
Lastly, the climax of the book is devoted to a collection of contemporary blasphemies and defiant beliefs, but they are all attributed to the male protagonist while Ann just sits and looks at her hero with lovestruck eyes.
What a dismal failure to carry through on the book’s initial premise and purpose.
Credit
Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells was published in 1909. References are to the 1993 Everyman paperback edition.
Books & Boots 