Williams was previously an instructor at Rutgers University and is currently a freelance writer. In the following essay, she offers an overview of the psychoanalytic interpretations of Wells's "The Door in the Wall," suggesting that Wells warns of the dangers of ignoring the value of imagination.

In "The Door in the Wall," H. G. Wells explores what Roslynn D. Haynes has called a characteristically Wellsian concern: the relationship between imagination and reason, or between the aesthetic and the practical. As a boy, Lionel Wallace, now a prominent politician and man of the world, stumbled across a green door in a white wall Entering, even though he felt certain "his father would be very angry," Wallace found a fantastic garden. He sees the green door several more times during his life, but always at times when stopping to enter the garden would mean sacrificing worldly success.

The symbolic...