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    Ann Veronica
    Ann Veronica
    Ann Veronica
    Audiobook11 hours

    Ann Veronica

    Written by H.G. Wells

    Narrated by Liz Pearce

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    At twenty-one, the passionate and headstrong Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to rule her own life. When her autocratic father forbids her, via formal letter, from attending a fashionable art-school ball, and even further refuses to allow her advanced study of science, she decides she has no choice but to leave her family home and make a fresh start alone. She escapes the stodgy suburbs to London, enrolling as a student of biology and immersing herself in a world of intellectuals, socialists, and suffragettes. Soon, however, she finds that freedom comes at a price, when she meets the brilliant Capes, a married acad emic, and falls hopelessly in love.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 20, 2015
    ISBN9781490657561
    Author

    H.G. Wells

    H.G. Wells is considered by many to be the father of science fiction. He was the author of numerous classics such as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and many more. 

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    • 4/5
      [Ann Veronica] by H G Wells subtitled a modern love storyA grown up story about a young lady growing up in early 20th Century Edwardian England. When Ann veronica was published in 1909; Suffragette militancy had been a fact of life for the last five years, the first world war was still five years away and women would not get the vote on the same terms as men until 1928. The newspaper paper talk was of a sex war and Wells does not hesitate to plunge into this maelstrom of opinions with his story of Ann Veronica.H G Wells' progressive, socialist views were well known to all his readers and it could be argued that many of his novels take on a sort of preachiness in tone that makes some of them disjointed, perhaps they are even used as an excuse for Wells to beat his readers over the head with his views. This is not the case in Ann Veronica, Wells had found a subject where he only had to give a true impression of a young unmarried woman's lot in life, and the difficulties that she faced to become independent, for him to demonstrate the follies of Edwardian social structures. The story is told from Ann Veronica's point of view; we find her as a 21 year old woman living under the protection of her father in the suburbs of London. She is a bright, intelligent and attractive all of the things her father wishes she wasn't. He sees her role as looking after his household and caring for him. He is far too busy dealing with his work in the city of London to worry about Veronica. A crisis is reached when Veronica wants to go to an art school dance, her father forbids her to go and when she defies him he physically restrains her so that she cannot leave the house. Her only recourse is to run away, there is no one who she can turn to who can help her in her situation."“I want to be a Person said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky “I wii not let this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place” There is a note of desperation in her voice as she sees herself in a pit from which there is no escape. She escapes to London and manages to find a bedsitter, but she has no way of earning a living or continuing with her work at the Imperial college of science. She meets Mr Rammage who she knows form her home town, he is a successful business man and when she goes to him for help he suggests a business arrangement and makes her a loan of 40 pounds sterling. Rammage we understand is a lover of women, rather like Wells;“A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself” Ramage had said “a Woman comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may give herself.”Rammage of course expects that Veronica will become his mistress and it is only when she narrowly avoids being raped by him that she realises the burden of debt that she is under. In desperation she turns her attention to the womens suffragette movement and volunteers to take militant action. She is involved in an attempt to disrupt Parliament for which she is unceremoniously arrested and sentenced to a month in prison. Wells' treatment of this suffragette raid is even handed, but told from Veronica's point of view it appears a desperate, frightening act, but one which she could easily view as her only course of action.In jail she has plenty of time to think and comes to realise that the only course of action left to her is to return home to her father and negotiate the best deal for her independence that she can:“I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman’s life is all chance. It’s artificial chance. Find your man that’s the rule. All the rest is humbug and delicacy. He’s the handle of life for you. He will let you live if it pleases him." She gets to continue her work at the Imperial College and there falls in love with her tutor (Capes). Veronica never makes easy choices however and she discovers that Capes is married, but separated from his wife, who will not divorce him. The love affair between Capes and Veronica takes up the second half of the novel, but there are tensions here as well. It is only when Veronica takes decisive action that these can be resolved. The novel falls neatly into two parts, but both depict the difficulties of being an independent woman in Edwardian England. Veronicas struggles in the first part are totally absorbing and the suffragette raid is vividly depicted. There are also the tensions of the love affair in the second part, but when these are resolved the novel fades a little at the end to a depiction of a young loves dream. Well's novel caused a bit of a scandal in 1909, not because of his sympathetic depiction of the suffragette movement but because of Veronica's decision to become Capes' mistress. A leading critic John St Leo Strachey condemned the book as "poisonous" because it treated female sexuality and sex outside marriage, not as shockingly sinful but as natural behaviour. Wells had not made Veronica pay for her actions and this is what upset some of the critics. I think there can be no better testimony as to how difficult it was for a woman at that time, and Wells brings this out brilliantly.I have now read over twenty books by H G Wells and Ann Veronica is one of his best. You are never going to get a finely judged well balanced novel from him because he was always so impatient to move onto the next thing, but this one is better than most and so a four star read.
    • 4/5
      An unusual H G Wells novel, being written from the point of view of a woman. The first two thirds of the story are about Ann Veronica's struggle to assert her independence, personal, sexual and political, from her father and aunt and their milieu; the last third are more of a conventional love story, mirroring Wells's life experiences and hopes at the time. It gets a bit too sentimental near the end and the novel ends about in time.
    • 3/5
      I'd only read HG Wells' science-fiction, which all reek of their era, so this book was a surprise because it was published in 1909 but feels modern: the suffragettes, socialists and other trendy radicals that the heroine Anne Veronica gets involved with seem straight out of the late sixties/early seventies. Wells describes the confusion of Fabian meetings and the “inexplicable enthusiasm” of the suffrage movement, with its “incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends”. The trendy revolutionaries have difficulty agreeing on anything and many of them are crackpots. The now familiar feminist political theories are presumably obtained from the author's many (all very bright) girlfriends - “Women have practically NO economic freedom,” said Miss Miniver, “because they have no political freedom."

      The atmosphere is modern even though there are still horse-drawn cabs, (along with electric lighting).

      Anne Veronica wants to escape the prison-like restrictions imposed on her by her father, and runs away from home. She goes to suffragette meetings, but she can’t stand the thought of getting involved in demonstrations, badgering cabinet ministers and all the undignified consequences. The laboratory where she attempts to pursue scientific studies provides a retreat for her: she loves its relevance, everything in it is focused on pursuing and identifying biological structures. But she is not a wimpy Victorian woman (definitely not like most of Charles Dickens' females); she's a toughnut. When a neighbour, Mr Ramage (note, change the "m" to a "v" and you get the idea), tries to force himself on her, she beats him up. In reaction afterwards, she gets involved in a suffragette riot and spends a month in prison.

      The end of the book drifts and gets soppy, as Anne Veronica runs off with her One True Love (a scientist) and they wander all over the continent, presumably screwing their bums off. It all ends in unlikely happiness when he turns to writing and makes a fortune. Nevertheless worth reading for the strange familiarity of this now more than one-hundred year old world.
    • 4/5
      Not quite as good as the History of Mr. Polly, but nevertheless well worth reading. I think of it as D.H. Lawrence light, not entirely a bad thing. Ann Veronica is looking for life with a capital L and is living in a world that offers women life with a decidedly lower case l. She rebels against her father, moves to London on her own, and then interacts with three men. Capes she loves, but he's already married (though unhappily, and wishes for divorce). Ramage would like A.V. as his mistress; he thinks he's rather obviously proposing and arranging this; she's too naive to see what he's up to. Sexual assault scene at a private restaurant is really well-written and gripping. Manning is the bland man in the middle, the husband her world would like her to take. She'd like to take him too, only she doesn't love him. A previous generation wouldn't have cared; Ann Veronica does care. The descriptions of living life to the fullest, of the value of love, etc. are Lawrence without the fire. Unlike Lawrence, they're never over the top--that's both their virtue and their flaw.

      1 person found this helpful