Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
1909
In 1909, H.G. Wells detonated a small scandal with this novel about a twenty-one-year-old woman who walks out of her father's house and doesn't look back. Ann Veronica Stanley is finished being told what to do: not to dance, not to study science, not to want too much from life. She decamps for London, enrolls in biology at Imperial College, and discovers a world of radicals, suffragettes, and ideas that burn hot enough to forge a new self. But when she falls impossibly, inconveniently in love with the brilliant Capes, a married man, she finds that freedom isn't the exit from complication, it's the door you walk through into harder choices. Wells writes his heroine with fierce tenderness, making her impatience, her desires, and her mistakes feel startlingly modern. A century before the conversation about women choosing themselves became mainstream, Ann Veronica chose, and the cost was everything she thought she wanted.
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“The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.””
— H. G. Wells
“[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.””
— H. G. Wells
