Author | H. G. Wells |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1914 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Published in English | October 1914 |
Pages | 525 |
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is a 1914 novel by H. G. Wells.
The protagonist of The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is Lady Harman, née Ellen Sawbridge. The moral, emotional, and intellectual conflicts that this tall, sensitive, graceful woman confronts arise in the context of a loveless marriage with Sir Isaac Harman, a self-made man who has grown rich as the proprietor of International Bread and Cake Stores and Staminal Bread. [1] Sir Isaac meets his future wife when she is only seventeen and still a student in a boardinghouse in Wimbledon; she marries him largely out of pity. But the marriage is not a happy one, despite great wealth and the birth of four children. Sir Isaac is inherently domineering, and in an age of Suffragettes he encounters a desire for greater freedom in his wife.
The plot of the novel turns on Lady Harman's relationship with George Brumley (invariably "Mr. Brumley" in the text), a successful genteel novelist whose wife has died three and a half years earlier. Lady Harman meets Mr. Brumley because the Harmans buy his house, Black Strand, in the countryside outside London. Mr. Brumley falls in love with Lady Harman at first sight. His interest in her leads him and a number of acquaintances to pay Lady Harman a visit. This results is invitations to luncheons and committees for Lady Harman, and despite all his efforts the possessive Sir Isaac is unable to quell his wife's desire to accept. Through many twists and turns Mr. Brumley's attachment to Lady Harman increases until, after the death of Sir Isaac, he appears to win her love on the novel's concluding page. (This comes after she has definitively refused to marry him, and the reader is left uncertain whether her passionate kiss signifies that she has changed her mind on this question.)
Like Ann Veronica , The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman reflects H.G. Wells's enthusiasm for the ideal of the New Woman. Lady Harman's interest in the condition of women persuades Sir Isaac (after Lady Harman's imprisonment for a month for breaking a post office window in support of the cause of women's suffrage has shocked him into acquiescence) to invest in the creation of six boardinghouses for working women. She enlists the aid of the devoted Mr. Brumley, and his inquiries result in certain Wellsian convictions that she embraces: "the forces of social organization have been coming into play now, more and more for a century and a half, to produce new wholesale ways of doing things, new great organizations, organizations that invade the autonomous family more and more, and are perhaps destined ultimately to destroy it altogether and supersede it." [2] Lady Harman comes to see her work with the hostels in this context and as her raison d'être.
While somewhat muted, racial anti-Semitic stereotypes permeate the novel. Sir Isaac's avidity, and his pointed nose and its visibility in his children, are frequently mentioned, and his business efficiency is linked to characteristics like those suggested in this passage about his youth: "his disposition at cricket to block and to bowl 'sneaks' and 'twisters' under-arm had raised his average rather than his reputation; he had evaded fights and dramatic situations, and protected himself on occasions of unavoidable violence by punching with his white knuckles held in a peculiar and vicious manner. He has always been a little insensitive to those graces of style, in action if now in art, which appeal so strongly to the commoner sort of English mind; he played first for safety, and that assured, for uttermost advantage. These tendencies became more marked with maturity." [3] But Sir Isaac's Jewishness is never discussed; indeed, it is never even made explicit. Instead, it is conveyed through asides and insinuations.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is also an extensive satire of many aspects of British society on the eve of World War I.
H.G. Wells wrote most of The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman in late 1913 and early 1914; the novel was published in October 1914. Wells claimed that the title character derived from Maud Pember Reeves and Agnes Eleanor Jacobs née Williams.
Early reviews were tentative, but grew more positive after Holbrook Jackson reviewed the novel favourably in T.P.'s Weekly . [4] But Walter Lippmann judged it a "careless book" written from the "upper layers" of Wells's mind. [5] In 1951 biographer Vincent Brome observed that the novel was "read with deeply diminished interest to-day." [6] Biographers Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie called The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman Wells's "counterpart of Ibsen's A Doll's House ." [7]
Love and Mr Lewisham is a 1900 novel set in the 1880s by H. G. Wells. It was among his first fictional writings outside the science fiction genre. Wells took considerable pains over the manuscript and said that "the writing was an altogether more serious undertaking than I have ever done before." He later included it in a 1933 anthology, Stories of Men and Women in Love.
Ann Veronica is a novel by H. G. Wells published in 1909. It describes the rebellion of Ann Veronica Stanley, "a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty", against her middle-class father's stern patriarchal rule. The novel dramatizes the contemporary problem of the New Woman. It is set in Edwardian era London and environs, except for an Alpine excursion. Ann Veronica offers vignettes of the women's suffrage movement in Great Britain and features a chapter inspired by the 1908 attempt of suffragettes to storm Parliament.
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland along with Hugh MacDiarmid, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and John MacCormick. He was knighted in the 1952 Birthday Honours List.
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 modelled the Outline on the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot.
"The Land Ironclads" is a short story by British writer H. G. Wells, which originally appeared in the December 1903 issue of the Strand Magazine. It features tank-like "land ironclads," 80-to-100-foot-long armoured fighting vehicles that carry riflemen, engineers, and a captain, and are armed with semi-automatic rifles.
The Bride of Lammermoor is a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1819, one of the Waverley novels. The novel is set in the Lammermuir Hills of south-east Scotland, shortly before the Act of Union of 1707, or shortly after the Act. It tells of a tragic love affair between young Lucy Ashton and her family's enemy Edgar Ravenswood. Scott indicated the plot was based on an actual incident. The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose were published together anonymously as the third of Scott's Tales of My Landlord series. The story is the basis for Donizetti's 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor.
The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) is one of the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott. Set in London in either 1623 or 1624, it centres on the Scottish community there after the Union of the Crowns and features James VI and I.
The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells.
Saint Ronan's Well is one of the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott. Set in a fashionable spa in the Scottish Borders, it is the only novel he wrote with a 19th-century setting.
Men Like Gods (1923) is a novel, referred to by the author as a "scientific fantasy", by English writer H. G. Wells. It features a utopia located in a parallel universe.
A Mad Couple Well-Match'd is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome. It was first published in the 1653 Brome collection Five New Plays, issued by the booksellers Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot, and Thomas Dring.
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.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through is H. G. Wells's "masterpiece of the wartime experience in south eastern England." The novel was published in September 1916.
The Soul of a Bishop is a 1917 novel by H. G. Wells.
The Sea Lady is a fantasy novel by British writer H. G. Wells, incorporating elements 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 came when Wells caught a glimpse of May Nisbet, the daughter of The Times drama critic, in a bathing suit during her visit to Sandgate. Wells had 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."
First and Last Things is a 1908 work of philosophy by H. G. Wells setting forth his beliefs in four "books" entitled "Metaphysics," "Of Belief," "Of General Conduct," and "Some Personal Things." Parts of the book were published in the Independent Magazine in July and August 1908. Wells revised the book extensively in 1917, in response to his religious conversion, but later published a further revision in 1929 that restored much of the book to its earlier form. Its main intellectual influences are Darwinism and certain German thinkers Wells had read, such as August Weismann. The pragmatism of William James, who had become a friend of Wells, was also an influence.
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.
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.
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.