Ann Veronica

Ann Veronica Stanley is twenty-two years old in 1909, trapped in a Wimbledon household ruled by her authoritarian father. She wants to study science at Imperial College London. Her father says no. So she packs a suitcase, defies convention, and walks out into a world that has very little place for an unmarried woman with ambitions. H.G. Wells, himself a man who chafed against convention, penned this incendiary portrait of female rebellion as a kind of love letter to the New Woman, that generation of women who dared to want more than marriage and domesticity. Ann Veronica finds work, joins the suffragettes, falls in love with a married man, and discovers that freedom is both exhilarating and terrifying. The novel caused immediate outrage upon publication, with The Spectator branding it "poisonous", high praise for a book that had the audacity to suggest a young woman might have the right to choose her own life. Over a century later, Ann Veronica's stubborn, sometimes painful insistence on selfhood still resonates.