 First edition | |
| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Passionate Friends: A Novel |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Harper and Brothers |
Publication date | 1913 |
Published in English | September 1913 |
| Pages | 363 |
The Passionate Friends is a 1913 coming of age novel by H. G. Wells detailing the life and travels of a young man. It is notable as the first introduction of Wells's notion of an "open conspiracy" of individuals to achieve a world state. [1]
The narrator says that "The idea of writing such a book as this came to me first as I sat by the dead body of your grandfather." [2] Wells's father, Joseph, died of heart failure on 14 October 1910, at the age of 82, and one biographer has noted that his death "neatly coincided with the end of his major period as a creative writer." [3] Much of the novel was written at the end of 1911. [4]
Wells was attached to the notion that parents might become the "friends" of their adult children, and the novel's protagonist Stephen Stratton wonders: "Why is it, I thought, that when a son has come to manhood he cannot take his father for a friend?" [5]
The novel is mysteriously dedicated to "L. E. N. S.," possibly referring to Wells' lover Elizabeth von Arnim, whom Wells had nicknamed "little e" and with whom he enjoyed assignations at her house, the Château Soleil, in the Alps, at the ski resort of Montana, Switzerland. [6]
The protagonist is the novel's first-person narrator, Stephen Stratton. The most important relationship of Stephen's life is with the Lady Mary Christian, with whom he falls in love at the age of nineteen during the summer before he begins his studies at Oxford. Mary returns his love, but weds Justin, a wealthy financier.
In despair, Stephen volunteers to fight in South Africa, where the Second Boer War has just begun. Back in England he decides to pursue a political career and reconnects with Lady Mary Justin, and they become lovers. Disaster strikes when Justin sees Stephen kiss his wife. Justin hides Mary away in an Irish castle and forces Stephen to leave England for three years.
Traveling the world, Stephen studies Asian societies and develops convictions about the historical development of humanity. In a villa on the Rhine he meets his old love Rachel again, and they are married. Stephen begins a career as a publisher of world literature and reference books.
In 1909, Stephen receives a letter from Lady Mary Justin and they begin a longstanding written correspondence. By chance, they meet again at an inn in the Alps, and share several hours of spiritual communing; they scarcely touch and never kiss. Mary's companion betrays her to her husband, whose decision to divorce Mary after a trial for adultery threatens them both with social disaster. To forestall this, Mary dies by suicide.
The Passionate Friends was appreciated by Wells's friends Ford Madox Hueffer and Violet Hunt, and by Maurice Baring. Reviews were largely positive. Wells affected, in a letter to Henry James, to consider the novel "gawky" and to believe that "It has been thrust into the world too soon." [7]
Work was begun on a stage version, but this did not come to fruition. Two films of the same name have been made from the novel, one in 1922 and another in 1949.
The Passionate Friends was translated into Italian in 1914, into French in 1919, into Russian in 1924 and into Czech in 1928. When it was republished in the Atlantic Edition of his collected works (1926), Wells appended three essays to it: "Divorce," "The Endowment of Motherhood," and "The Great State."
The Passionate Friends public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution was published in 1928 by H. G. Wells, when he was 62 years old. It was revised and expanded in 1930 with the additional subtitle A Second Version of This Faith of a Modern Man Made More Explicit and Plain. In 1931 a further revised edition appeared titled What Are We to Do with Our Lives?. A final version appeared in 1933 under its original title. Many of its ideas are anticipated in Wells's 1926 novel The World of William Clissold.
The Outline of History, subtitled either "The Whole Story of Man" or "Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind", is a work by H. G. Wells chronicling the history of the world from the origin of the Earth to the First World War. It appeared in an illustrated version of 24 fortnightly installments beginning on 22 November 1919 and was published as a single volume in 1920. It sold more than two million copies, was translated into many languages, and had a considerable impact on the teaching of history in institutions of higher education. Wells modeled the Outline on the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot.
The Passionate Friends is a 1949 British romantic drama film directed by David Lean and starring Ann Todd, Claude Rains and Trevor Howard. The film is based on The Passionate Friends: A Novel (1913) by H. G. Wells. It describes a love triangle in which a woman cannot give up her affair with another man. The film was entered into the 1949 Cannes Film Festival.
A Modern Utopia is a 1905 novel by H. G. Wells.
The Wonderful Visit is an 1895 novel by H. G. Wells. With an angel—a creature of fantasy unlike a religious angel—as protagonist and taking place in contemporary England, the book could be classified as contemporary fantasy, although the genre was not recognised in Wells's time. The Wonderful Visit also has strong satirical themes, gently mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England as well as idealistic rebellion itself.
The World of William Clissold is a 1926 novel by H. G. Wells published initially in three volumes. The first volume was published in September to coincide with Wells's sixtieth birthday, and the second and third volumes followed at monthly intervals.
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster is a 1924 biography of Frederick William Sanderson (1857–1922) by H. G. Wells. It is the only biography Wells wrote. Sanderson was a personal friend, having met Wells in 1914 when his sons George Philip ('Gip'), born in 1901, and Frank Richard, born in 1903, became pupils at Oundle School, of which Sanderson was headmaster from 1892 to 1922. After Sanderson died, while giving a lecture at University College London, at which he was introduced by Wells, the famous author agreed to help produce a biography to raise money for the school. But in December 1922, after disagreements emerged with Sanderson's widow about his approach to the subject, Wells withdrew from the official biography and published his own work separately.
Select Conversations with an Uncle, published in 1895, was H. G. Wells's first literary publication in book form. It consists of reports of twelve conversations between a fictional witty uncle who has returned to London from South Africa with "a certain affluence," as well as two other conversations.
The Sea Lady is a fantasy novel by British writer H. G. Wells, including some of the aspects of a fable. It was serialized from July to December 1901 in Pearson's Magazine before being published as a volume by Methuen. The inspiration for the novel was Wells's glimpse of May Nisbet, the daughter of the Times drama critic, in a bathing suit, when she came to visit at Sandgate, Wells having agreed to pay her school fees after her father's death.
The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialised in The English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells's affair with Amber Reeves and satirised Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was "the literary scandal of its day".
The Discovery of the Future is a 1902 philosophical lecture by H. G. Wells that argues for the knowability of the future. It was originally delivered to the Royal Institution on January 24, 1902. Before appearing in book form, it was published by Richard Gregory in Nature on February 6, 1902, and was also published as part of the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. Available online.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is a 1914 novel by H. G. Wells.
An Englishman Looks at the World is a 1914 essay collection by H. G. Wells containing journalistic pieces written between 1909 and 1914. The book consists of twenty-six pieces ranging from five to sixty-two pages in length. An American edition was published the same year by Harper and Brothers under the title Social Forces in England and America.
Bealby: A Holiday is a 1915 comic novel by H. G. Wells.
The Undying Fire, a 1919 novel by H. G. Wells, is a modern retelling of the story of Job. Like the Book of Job, it consists of a prologue in heaven, an exchange of speeches with four visitors, a dialogue between the protagonist and God, and an epilogue in which the protagonist's fortunes are restored. The novel is dedicated "to All Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses and every Teacher in the World."
Experiment in Autobiography is an autobiographical work by H.G. Wells, originally published in two volumes. He began to write it in 1932, and completed it in the summer of 1934.
The Bulpington of Blup is a 1932 novel by H. G. Wells. It is a character study analyzing the psychological sources of resistance to Wellsian ideology, and was influenced by Wells's acquaintance with Carl Gustav Jung and his ideas.
Joan and Peter, a 1918 novel by H. G. Wells, is at once a satirical portrait of late-Victorian and Edwardian England, a critique of the English educational system on the eve of World War I, a study of the impact of that war on English society, and a general reflection on the purposes of education. Wells regarded it as "one of the most ambitious" of his novels.
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, generally known as Anticipations, was written by H.G. Wells at the age of 34. He later called the book, which became a bestseller, "the keystone to the main arch of my work." His most recent biographer, however, calls the volume "both the starting point and the lowest point in Wells's career as a social thinker."
The Passionate Friends is a 1922 British romantic drama film directed by Maurice Elvey and starring Milton Rosmer, Valia, and Fred Raynham. It is based on H.G. Wells' The Passionate Friends: A Novel (1913), which was adapted again by David Lean for his 1949 film The Passionate Friends.