ABSTRACT
This regime did not go unchallenged. The literary lion H.G.Wells, born-into the lowermiddle class-in 1866, campaigned against the ‘haunting emphasis on sacrifice and discipline’. His heroes were the radical intellectuals-William Godwin (born 1756) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (born 1792). Wells addressed his liberating manifesto to men and to women without children. His own marriage was far from conventional. According to his own account, he and his wife Jane negotiated a modus vivendi. He was licensed as a ‘casual lover’ whose extramarital ‘passades’ were to be indulged. She had ‘rooms of her own in Bloomsbury’ where she inhabited ‘the personality of Catherine Wells’, a writer. While they were alive, Wells protected his lovers’ reputations. The confessional postscript to his Experiment in Autobiography (1934) was not published for another fifty years. Even then it was expurgated. ‘Courtesy and concern over litigation’ led Wells’s son and editor to suppress further material that was finally published in Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H.G.Wells in 2001. It is impossible to estimate how common discreet extramarital
‘passades’ were among the majority of men and women who did not choose to share their secrets with posterity.
