To order this title or any other book in print, visit .uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Viking 256pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99 The Week Bookshop For a “compact overview” of this “endlessly fascinating man and writer”, Tomalin’s biography is “hard to beat”. “To this day, no one fully understands how one man, albeit a genius, was able to write so much and so well,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. He mixed with the likes of Henry James, George Gissing and Arnold Bennett. Wells was astonishingly versatile as a writer, churning out novels, short stories and reams of journalism as well as hard-hitting polemics (his anti-poverty tract, The Misery of Boots, can still “send a shiver up the spine”). I found all the “love stuff” a bit of a drag, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Tomalin sometimes sounds as if she approves of such behaviour: Wells, she writes, “knew how to… enjoy women and the world” – words that “sit ill” with the shabby conduct she skilfully portrays. Women found him irresistibly attractive – he “smelt deliciously of honey”, one said – and his many lovers included Rebecca West, with whom he fathered a son.īeing his wife can’t have been fun, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer: Robbins – whom Wells insisted on calling Jane – was even cajoled into buying clothes for another lover’s baby. Wells didn’t let two marriages (the first to his cousin Isabel, the second to one of his former students, Amy Robbins) stand in the way of his promiscuous nature. Wells gives its “keenest attention” to its subject’s personal relationships, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. In this “compulsively readable” biography, Claire Tomalin shows how Wells’s early experiences helped turn him into the “great prophet of the modern age”.įocusing on his first four decades, The Young H.G.
Yet he triumphantly surmounted these obstacles, becoming an astonishingly prolific author, as well as a “passionate socialist” and a relentless erotic adventurer (today, he would probably be branded a “sex addict”). Wells was a sickly child who essentially educated himself by “reading books in bed while recovering from life-threatening lung infections”. He was the product of a “working-class family of limited means”: his father was a shopkeeper in Bromley, his mother a lady’s maid. Book of the week: Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit.Book of the week: Noble Ambitions by Adrian Tinniswood.
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