About the Book
Published for the first time, The Open Heart is telling tale of unfulfilment from the supportive, but long-neglected wife of H.G Wells. Catherine Wells (1872-1928) was the wife of H.G. Wells and the author of short stories, poems, and of an unfinished novella, The Open Heart, a haunting study of a woman's sense of unfulfilment that adds significantly to our knowledge of early 20th-century feminism. Published here for the first time The Open Heart is also brought together with a selection of the stories that appeared with H.G. Wells's introduction in The Book of Catherine Wells (1928). It was only after her death from cancer in her mid-fifties that it became evident that Catherine Wells known otherwise as 'Jane', a gracious and indefatigable literary hostess and the business manager and sometime collaborator of H.G. Wells had herself been a serious author, who had rented a flat in London in which to write, and kept her creative life entirely separate from that of her husband. The Open Heart tells of a woman's shipwreck on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean, a kind of earthly paradise in which she finds herself entirely alone. The thoughts recorded in her diary form a spiritual autobiography from the author's early childhood to the premature death of the lover to whom she had been engaged to be married. At the same time, the diary powerfully expresses women's need for freedom from subjection to the opposite sex. Similar emotions and longings are present in a number of Catherine Wells's short stories which have realistic and contemporary settings. Other stories develop the vein of fantasy in her work, whether in a humorous or Gothic mode. There are highly accomplished tales of forbidden love, of a woman's subjection to a dominant and possessive husband and of female despair. These stories illustrate what H.G. Wells called 'her brooding tenderness', her 'sense of invincible fatality' and her 'predisposition towards a haunting, dreamland fantasy of fear'. The book begins with Introductions by the two editors, and concludes with an abridged version of H.G. Wells's memorial tribute to his wife. Here he describes how he chose the contents of The Book of Catherine Wells, and his reasons for excluding The Open Heart, which we are here publishing for the first time. The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure. AUTHOR: Catherine Wells (18721927), born Amy Catherine Robbins, worked as a teacher and studied at Tutorial College, Holborn where she met and later married H.G. Wells. She is regarded as a great supporter of her husband's literary outpourings, while quietly her creating her own stories, long-neglected until now. Emelyne Godfrey, PhD, is Chairperson of the H.G. Wells Society. She is author of Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012). In 2014 she edited The Convert, the first suffragette novel, originally published in 1907. Most recently, she was editor of Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris (2016). Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and President of the H.G. Wells Society. He is the author of many books on H.G. Wells, science fiction, and modern literature and is General Editor of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English (201124). Hardback, Decorated page edges, luxury end-paper, special treatment PLC
About the Author :
Catherine Wells (1872–1927), born Amy Catherine Robbins, worked as a teacher and studied at Tutorial College, Holborn where she met and later married H.G. Wells. She is regarded as a great supporter of her husband's literary outpourings, while quietly creating her own stories, long-neglected until now.
Emelyne Godfrey, PhD, is Chairperson of the H.G. Wells Society. She is author of Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012). In 2014 she edited The Convert, the first suffragette novel, originally published in 1907. Most recently, she was editor of Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris (2016).
Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and President of the H.G. Wells Society. He is the author of many books on H.G. Wells, science fiction and modern literature and is General Editor of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English (2011–24).
Review :
'Her fiction and poems are fascinating, and nearly all contain an element of fantasy or otherworldliness that would have set them apart from most other stories written at the time. In 'The Last Fairy', Catherine reveals her humour, often present, as an ancient fairy wreaks havoc in a town due to her inability to remember the spells she once knew. [...] Beautiful descriptions of nature suffuse the stories, reflecting Catherine's passion for flowers and gardening. [...] The unfinished novella, The Open Heart, is in fact a philosophical discourse on fidelity in love and marriage, the limitations of organised religion, the rights of women and societal constrains in general, all topics also close to the heart of Catherine's husband. The fantastical setting - a huge and beautiful uninhabited palace where the ship-wrecked female narrator is the only human - brings to mind the hauntingly beautiful setting of Susannah Clarke's novel Piranesi (2020). Overall, this volume reveals Catherine Wells to have been a modern, forgiving, capable woman, very much in control of a life that she made work for her. She was also, clearly, a talented writer who deserves her moment in the spotlight.
"Whether it’s scandal, humour, repression, or yearning, Catherine Wells’ writing offers new angles on established ideas; and so while ‘The Open Heart’ itself is the only “new” addition, since all of Wells’ prose/poems here have been published before, it’s worth a gander, and especially if you’ve never experienced her writing before, this is where to go!"
"[To] be enjoyed as beautiful, scary and, sometimes, odd little tales in their own right."
