That the unfortunate woman should sicken and die was held to be her just punishment; that man too should bear part penalty was found unavoidable, though much legislation and medical effort has been spent to shield him; but to the further consequences society is but now waking up.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
Mr. H. G. Wells is an author whose work I have followed with delight, interest and respect for years—since first I read that sinister vision of dead worlds, "The Time Machine." He is a successful craftsman, an artist of power; and has that requisite so often missing in our literary craftsmen and artists—something to say. In his mighty work of electrifying the world's slow mind to the splendid possibilities of life as it might be, may be, will be, as soon as we wake up, he has my admiring sympathy.
But alas! and alas! Like many another great man, Mr. Wells loses his perspective and clear vision when he considers women. He sees women as females—and does not see that they are human; the universal mistake of the world behind us; but one unworthy of a mind that sees the world before us so vividly.
He has knowledge, the scientific habit of mind, an enormous imagination and the courage to use it; he is not, usually, afraid of facts, even when an admission carries reproach. But in this field he shows simply the old race-mind, that attitude which considers women as mothers, potential, active, and in retrospect; and as nothing else. He likes them as mothers. He honors them as mothers. He wants to have them salaried, as mothers. But he thinks it quite beyond reason that they should appear as regular members of the working world; their motherhood, to his mind, would prevent it.
In this attitude he has produced a vivid novel called Ann Veronica; a book of keen analysis and delicate observation, full of amusing darts and flashes; seeing and showing much that is absurd in our modern uneasiness and wavering discussion; and thus explained by himself in The Spectator (which had denounced the work as "poisonous").
"My book was written primarily to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays at their unavoidable practical dependence upon some individual man not of their deliberate choice"; and he further says he sympathizes with the woman who lives with a man she does not love; and respects her natural desire to prefer some one man as her husband and father of her children—a harmless position surely.
To carry out these feelings he has described a girl, vigorous and handsome, a nice, normal girl, who is crushed and stultified in her home life and wants to get out of it; as is the case with so many girls today. She wants freedom—room to grow—more knowledge and power—again as is so common nowadays. We read with sympathy, admiring his keen sure touch, hoping much for this brave woman in her dash for freedom.
Then he makes this girl, so strong and intelligent, deliberately refuse various kinds of work she might have done because they did not please her; and borrow money from a man in preference to earning her living. She exposes herself to insult and even danger with an idiocy that even a novel-reared child of sixteen would have scorned. She falls in love, healthfully enough, with a fine strong man; and sees no reason for avoiding him when she learns he is married. She cheerfully elopes with him—quite forgetting the money she had borrowed, and when she remembers about that abhorrent debt, expects her companion to pay it, without a qualm apparently.
The ex-wife must have conveniently died after a while; and the man develops a sudden new talent as a playwright; for they wind up very respectably in a nice flat, having Ann Veronica's father and aunt to dinner, and regarding them as a pair of walking mummies. Nothing more is said of any desire on the part of the heroine for freedom, knowledge, independence; having attained her man she has attained all; indeed Mr. Wells goes to the pains to fully express his idea of the case, by describing her early struggle and outburst as like "the nuptial flight of an ant."