H.G.Wells and Rebecca West

This joint biography tells the story of the literary partnership between two unusually gifted and imaginative writers. The liaison between H.G.Wells and Rebecca West lasted ten years, from 1913 to 1923, during which time they influenced each other's writing and both produced fiction which re-imagined and drew creatively on their relationship. Wells and West first met when he was 46, already a famous novelist with "The Time Machine", "The War of the Worlds" and "Tono-Bungay" among his published fiction. She was 19, just making a name for herself as an outspoken writer on political and feminist issues. Ten years later their lives and achievements were markedly different. Wells had gained an international reputation as a popular educator with his best selling "Outline of History" and "A Short History of the World". He was happy with his wife and sons and increasingly occupied with politics and world affairs. West was still making her way as a literary artist. She had published two novels of considerable promise - "The Return of the Soldier" and "The Judge", but her career had been cut across by being the unmarried mother of Wells' child. The partnership between Wells and West finally crumbled because each wanted different things: she wanted security, reassurance, stability; but Wells wanted a goddess. These aims proved to be incompatible. Drawing on unpublished sources and on John Hammond's original and extensive research, this biography places the extraordinary relationship of Wells and West, and its effect on their creative lives, in its full literary context. Hammond's assessment of each writer's personalities, their differences of literary and intellectual opinion and their respective literary works breaks new ground, as does the emphasis on the way in which the partnership affected, in positive and negative ways, the work of these two writers.