The Secret Places of the Heart
1922
H.G. Wells fell hard for Margaret Sanger, and this novel is the breathless result. Based on their actual affair, it's a thinly-veiled autobiographical roman à clef about Sir Richmond Hardy, a distinguished Englishman whose marriage has crumbled and whose mind has grown restless with the suffocating weight of postwar England. Traveling the English countryside with his psychiatrist, Hardy attempts to sort through his tangled feelings about his wife, his lover, and his own shrinking place in a world that seems to be collapsing around him. Wells uses this framework to explore desire, duty, and the impossible question of whether any of us can truly know our own hearts. It's intimate, it's exposing, and it reads like a man writing from underneath his own skin. The novel works best as a period piece about the cost of being a certain kind of man in a certain kind of era, when empire and certainty both began to fade.
