Ann Veronica.

When Ann Veronica Stanley slams the door on her father's respectable suburban house, she is walking out of one world and into a fight for the right to shape her own existence. H. G. Wells made of that walk one of the most controversial novels of its day.

What it's about

Ann Veronica is an intelligent, restless young woman chafing against the constraints of a conventional Edwardian upbringing. Refused the freedom she craves, she leaves home to pursue her education, her independence, and ultimately her own choices in love, entering the ferment of student life, scientific study, and the suffrage movement. Her rebellion carries real risk and real cost, and the novel follows her as she insists, against every pressure, on living as a full and self-determining person.

Themes

The book is a central document of New Woman fiction, engaging directly with female independence, sexual freedom, education, and the campaign for women's rights. Wells sets individual desire against social convention, and personal honesty against respectable hypocrisy, dramatising the emergence of the modern woman with sympathy and provocation.

Why it still matters

Its frank treatment of a woman's right to choose her own life and love caused an outcry when it appeared, and its concerns remain strikingly current. As a vivid record of the changing role of women at the turn of the twentieth century, it retains both historical importance and living force.

Who it's for

For readers interested in early feminist fiction, in Wells beyond his science romances, and in the social history of women's emancipation, and for anyone drawn to a bold heroine claiming her own future.