Ann Veronica: H.G. Wells

My grandmother had a copy of Ann Veronica on her shelves. As far as I can remember it was the only Wells she owned. I like to think she read it when it first came out and found it heartening.

I've always rather kept Wells at arm's length. I read the early SF novels when I was a kid and The New Machiavelli at University- and carried away the impression that he wasn't really my sort of thing. I was wrong.  Ann Veronica is awfully jolly- a breezy, loosely constructed yarn about a young girl getting her mojo on among the suffragettes and Tolstoyans and frog-eyed sugar daddies of a prematurely swinging, Edwardian London.