exemplars of the open mind.  She came to an open quarrel with her father on the question of attending a somewhat Bohemian fancy-dress ball, and she had the courage and determination to uphold her declaration of independence.  She ran away, came up to London from her father’s suburb, took lodgings and essayed quite unsuccessfully to make her own living.  She failed in this endeavour because she had not been educated or trained for any of those few and specialised occupations that women may attempt in modern conditions.  She learned by experience various essentials that had been omitted from any teaching she had received at home, and ended that phase of her life by falling in love with Capes, demonstrator at the Westminster Imperial College, a man who was living apart from his wife.  Ann Veronica’s story is the first serious essay in feminism—­a term that takes a much wider meaning in Mr Wells’ definition than is commonly attributed to it.  The novel presents the claim of the woman to free herself from the restrictions that once almost necessarily limited her sphere of action, restrictions that are ever becoming more meaningless in a civilisation that has enforced new economic conditions.  But Mr Wells goes far beyond that elementary proposition.  He has tried in Ann Veronica—­and again with a more delicate probe in Marriage and The Passionate Friends—­to touch the hidden thing that is causing all this surface inflammation.  He has analysed and diagnosed the exposed evil, always it seems with a certain tentativeness, and we are left to carry on his line of research; many of the difficulties of the problem are indicated, but no sovereign specific for the malady.

Tono-Bungay (1909) touches only casually on the sex question.  The involved love affairs of George Ponderevo are less essential than the career of his uncle, the inventor of the patent medicine that gives a title to the book.  In many ways Tono-Bungay is the best novel that Mr Wells has given us.  It is written in the first person, a narrative form that afterwards served to convey Mr Wells’ interpolated criticisms of the bodies social and politic in something nearly approaching the shape of an essay, but in Tono-Bungay there are no important divagations from the development of the story.  The framework of the book is provided by the life history of the narrator from early boyhood to middle age, matter interesting enough in itself even if it had not provided the means for revealing the inwardness of Edward Ponderevo’s character and career.  He was not a bad little man, this plump little chemist; a Lombroso or a Ferri would have found difficulty in classifying him as a “criminal type,” however eager those investigators might have been to confirm their pet theories.  Ponderevo’s wife—­the inimitable Aunt Susan—­called him “Teddy” and his nephew endorses the appropriateness of that diminutive; he affirms that there was a characteristic “teddiness”