ABSTRACT
During the Edwardian period Elizabeth became acquainted with a number of literary men who professed to support women’s suffrage. One was H.G. Wells whose views on women were, in her eyes, antediluvian. She was not afraid to state this publicly. In The Convert Vida discusses Wells’s In the Days of the Comet, pointing out that ‘Even in his most rationalized vision of the New Time’, the author ‘can’t help betraying his old-fashioned prejudice in favour of the “dolly” view of women’.1 What infuriated Elizabeth was that ‘a profoundly interesting person & a genius’ had falsely convinced himself that he understood women. His vision of social progress was fundamentally impaired by his failure to confront the nature of woman’s desire which, as Susan Squier has pointed out, lies at the centre of The Convert2
When, in 1909, Ann Veronica was published, Elizabeth and other feminists were outraged at Wells’s selfish advocacy of free love.3 She argued that ‘thinking people won’t endure free love’ since ‘love can’t ever be free for women & never free except for the meaner sort of men’. She resented his depiction of suffragettes. Yet when she told Wells ‘Until I read Ann Veronica I did not know how meanly you thought of the movement’, he replied, ‘There’s absolutely nothing in Ann Veronica against the suffrage only a quite kindly criticism of the suffragette side of it.’ Learning that the WWSL had invited him to give a reading at a reception she used her power as president to protest, arguing that he had abused his position and ridiculed suffrage and its workers. To his annoyance he was replaced.
