Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story

H. G. Wells wrote and published the book, Ann Veronica a modern love story in 1909. It talks of Ann Veronica Stanley's uprising against her middle-class father's strict patriarchal control as 'a young woman of about two-and-twenty.' The New Woman's issue in modern society is dramatized in the book. Except for a vacation to the mountains, it takes place in Victorian-era London and its surroundings. Ann Veronica provides snapshots of the British women's suffrage struggle and includes a chapter that was motivated by the suffragettes' failed effort to storm Parliament in 1908. The story revolves around her father who forbids her from attending a ball, she leaves home to live independently. She borrows money from an older man to study and falls in love with Capes, the laboratory's 'demonstrator'. Due to the heroine's feminist sympathies and the romance Wells was having with Amber Reeves, the woman who served as the inspiration for Ann Veronica, the book caused a sensation when it was released in the autumn of 1909. Even though the book now seems fairly mild-mannered, Ann Veronica was criticized as 'capable of poisoning the minds of people who read it' by The Spectator in its day as being a scandalous work.