Catherine Wells (1872-1928) was the wife of H.G. Wells and the author of short stories, poems, and of an unfinished novella, The Open Heart, a haunting study of a woman’s sense of unfulfilment that adds significantly to our knowledge of early 20th-century feminism. Published here for the first time The Open Heart is also brought together with a selection of the stories that appeared with H.G. Wells’s introduction in The Book of Catherine Wells (1928).

It was only after her death from cancer in her mid-fifties that it became evident that Catherine Wells – known otherwise as ‘Jane’, a gracious and indefatigable literary hostess and the business manager and sometime collaborator of H.G. Wells – had herself been a serious author, who had rented a flat in London in which to write, and kept her creative life entirely separate from that of her husband. The Open Heart tells of a woman’s shipwreck on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean, a kind of earthly paradise in which she finds herself entirely alone. The thoughts recorded in her diary form a spiritual autobiography from the author’s early childhood to the premature death of the lover to whom she had been engaged to be married. At the same time, the diary powerfully expresses women’s need for freedom from subjection to the opposite sex. Similar emotions and longings are present in a number of Catherine Wells’s short stories which have realistic and contemporary settings. Other stories develop the vein of fantasy in her work, whether in a humorous or Gothic mode. There are highly accomplished tales of forbidden love, of a woman’s subjection to a dominant and possessive husband and of female despair. These stories illustrate what H.G. Wells called ‘her brooding tenderness’, her ‘sense of invincible fatality’ and her ‘predisposition towards a haunting, dreamland fantasy of fear’.

The book begins with Introductions by the two editors, and concludes with an abridged version of H.G. Wells’s memorial tribute to his wife. Here he describes how he chose the contents of The Book of Catherine Wells, and his reasons for excluding The Open Heart, which we are here publishing for the first time.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.

Book Information
ISBN 9781835622551
Author Catherine Wells
Format Hardback
Page Count 416
Imprint Flame Tree Publishing
Publisher Flame Tree Publishing
Weight(grams) 600g