The Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells

Description

The Passionate Friends opens as an address from father to son, a man in middle age resolving to state his life plainly before the habits of concealment become permanent. The craft of the confession is Wells entirely: the youthful Stephen meets the bright and class-divided Mary Christian when both are too young to know what they are promising, and the promise survives boyhood, education and the world’s arithmetic of who deserves whom.

Each marries as the world insists, each finds marriage less spacious than its billboard promised, and their friendship, crushed and rekindled, becomes the running thread of two lives that keep belonging to other people. The novel is famous for its rage at the institution that wasted both of them, and for its uneasy ending, part resignation, part dream of a better arrangement. It is Wells the social critic and Wells the autobiographer writing a single, quite devastating book.

Why it still lands

• One of literature’s frankest accounts of a love kept alive against all institutional odds.
• An attack on marriage from a novelist who was himself estranged from one.
• Modernist inner life with a Victorian narrative engine.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 20 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.