August 5, 1914. Just after midnight, as Britain was entering the war, an illegitimate baby was born in an anonymous redbrick house on the northern coast. His mother, Rebecca West, whose real name was Cicily Fairfield, held the sleeping infant while her sister and a friend perched on her bed. The baby's father, H.G.Wells, was 100 miles away, sitting up late in pyjamas, in the study of his large, comfortable house in Essex, putting the finishing touches to an essay. His wife, Jane, was asleep in the bedroom. He loved his wife, and he loved his young mistress. He loved his ivy-covered Georgian house, Easton Glebe - a symbol of how far he had come from his hard-scrabble origins.
Wells prided himself on the fact that there had been no deception. Jane knew all about the affair. This was not the first, and it would not be the last. Jane was his anchor, his foundation, his sanity - there was no question of his living without Jane - but he suffered from a sexual restlessness.
This particular manifestation of it had been set in motion in September 1912, in the drawing room of Easton Glebe. Rebecca West was a rising 19-year-old journalist who wrote fierce, witty pieces for suffragette papers. H. G. Wells was already a world-famous author with influential friends, a classically pretty wife and two small sons. Wells was best known for scientific romances such as The Time Machine, but he had recently written a series of scandalous novels examining the relations between the sexes.
West had just written a taunting review of the latest. This critique had amused or intrigued him - and he invited her to lunch.
West was immediately overwhelmed by his unlikely magnetism: a small, round, middle-aged man, with light blue eyes, thickets of eyebrows and a moustache, he emanated the energetic confidence of a man highly valued by the world. For his part, Wells admired her wide brow, her dark, expressive eyes, and “splendid disturbed brain”.
The next time West visited Wells at his London house she appears to have asked him to sleep with her and relieve her of her innocence. Wells wrote to her shortly afterwards: “Dear Rebecca, You're a very compelling person. I suppose I shall have to do what you want me to do.”
The leisurely affair that might have ensued was cut short by a moment of carelessness, during which she conceived a child. West would later write to her son that Wells wantonly impregnated her “because he wanted the panache of having a child by the infant prodigy of the day”. As soon as he heard the news of her pregnancy, Wells's response was to tell his wife immediately. For all three of them, the wartime baby would be a test of their forward-thinking ideas.
Wells's unorthodox relations with his wife had already become the subject of much public speculation. Beatrice Webb, the founder of the Fabian Society, theorised that Jane couldn't criticise Wells's philandering because of the murky origins of her own relationship with him. When Jane met him he had been married to another woman.
Wells had renamed his wife, Amy Catherine Wells, “Jane”. When Mrs Wells was younger she had always gone by the name of Catherine, which she preferred to Amy. But Wells wanted to conjure a competent, sensible helpmate, and the proper name for this admirable and upstanding young woman seemed to be Jane.
To the world, Jane presented a composed and contented exterior. There are photographs of her bent over a Remington typewriter as she typed up her husband's manuscripts, looking the epitome of the dignified secretary. She managed his business affairs, shepherding his significant fortune into prudent investments and corresponding with his legion of agents, translators and editors. She created the comfortable environment that made it possible for the fussy and sensitive Wells to work. When his self-image faltered, she reflected back a confident, glowing version of who he was. “She stuck to me so sturdily,” he put it, “that in the end I stuck to myself.”
The only thing marring the cosy scene was his sexual disappointment. As he put it, Jane “regarded my sexual imaginativeness as a sort of constitutional disease; she stood by me patiently waiting for it to subside”.
An early turning point in their marriage was the harrowing birth of their first son, George Philip, in 1901. Wells's response was to run off for several months, leaving Jane to convalesce with the baby. Jane wrote Wells a warm, understanding letter in which she blamed herself for being too possessive when he left, and set their relationship on its stable new course.
In her own way, she conveyed that she was going to allow him all the absences he needed.
By the time West came along a decade later, Wells and Jane had worked out what he called a “modus vivendi” whereby he could have his affairs, which he referred to as “passades”, and she could be assured of his highest regard.
In the spring of 1914, Wells established the conspicuously pregnant, 21-year-old West in a bleak, semi- detached, redbrick house in a small seaside town.
A year earlier, West had written indignantly that an out-of-wedlock mother was “the most outcast thing on earth”. But Wells had impressed on her the need for discretion, and so the frank and voluble Rebecca hid her pregnancy, referring to the mysterious ailment that kept her in isolation as a “lung inflammation”.
Over the next few months West began to feel more and more the insecurity of her position. Love, she wrote, should be entered into only reluctantly. She denounced women “keeping themselves apart from the high purposes of life for an emotion that, schemed and planned for, was no better than the mad excitement of drunkenness.
“Since men don't love us nearly as much as we love them, that leaves them much more spare energy to be wonderful with,” she complained in one of her novels.
The last thing that the ambitious young feminist wanted was to be the concubine to a great man, but that was what she had effectively turned into. Wells was jealous. He admitted that all his elaborately articulated theories about free love fell apart when faced with the realities of his obsession. He found even West's mildest flirtations or friendships with men unbearable. He insisted that it was much worse for a man if a woman was unfaithful.
With all of their radical ideas, their fragile new ménage was based on the usual lies. He visited her as a fictional “Mr West”. They moved houses several times to avoid detection. Wells brooded. He believed that his earlier, highly public affair with Amber Reeves, with whom he had also had an illegitimate child, had shaken his standing in the literary world.
Wells found the baby unromantic. He did not enjoy his crying, or the nursery, or the waiting around, which he referred to in a stern letter to West as a “severe test” of his love for her. With her clever housekeeping and sprawling homes, Jane had insulated him from the daily noise of child-rearing. It galled him particularly that he should be confronted with the evidence of babies in the home of his mistress, the place he expressly intended as a flight from all the noise and clutter of domesticity.
Before he turned 4, their son had been sent away to boarding school.
During the last years of their relationship, West's yearnings for a fairly mundane respectability began to take over. Hearst's International Cosmopolitan would call her “the personification of all of the vitality, the courage, and the independence of the modern woman”. But after her mother died in 1921, Rebecca slipped into the language of married couples when she wrote to Wells, “Thank you for being such a good husband - I will try to be a good wife to you.”
In January 1922, West planned to meet Wells for a two-month holiday in Spain. But after a few walks on the beach and a quick tour of the sites, he took to his bed. West had to make her meals out of sandwiches and fruit because the sound of a knife or spoon scraping a plate irritated him. His attitude towards his minor ailments particularly irritated her because he had criticised her so often for her digestive problems, bronchial ailments and frequent infections.
At one point, in the lobby of their hotel, he told West to fetch his coat from upstairs in front of other people, and she exploded.
Wells was enormously attracted to the New Woman. He admired and yet didn't quite trust their vaunted independence. As he said to West: “Jane is a wife. But you could never be a wife. You want a wife yourself - you want sanity and care and courage and patience behind you just as much as I do.”
Finally, Wells wrote to West: “For ten years I've shaped my life mainly to repair the carelessness of one moment. It's no good and I am tired of it.”
As for his relationship with his Jane, he continued to see their originality as a couple as a feat of intellectual bravura: they had to think up a new way to live, like writers inventing a new style, or socialists penning a manifesto, or anthropol- ogists conducting an experiment.
He felt confident enough in his blamelessness to write: “I never get the slightest regret out of any of my sexual irregularities. They were amusing and refreshing, and I wish there had been more of them.”
In April 1906, when he was lecturing in America, Jane offered a much darker assessment in one of her letters: “I am thinking continually of the disappointing mess of it, the high bright ambitions one begins with, the dismal concessions - the growth, like a clogging hard crust over one of home & furniture & a lot of clothes & books & gardens & a load dragging me down. If I set out to make a comfortable home for you... I merely succeed in contriving a place where you are bored to death... Well, dear, I don't think I ought to send you such a lekker [sic], it's only a mood you know.”
A few years after the war, before Virginia Woolf delivered the first version of her A Room of One's Own as a lecture, Jane Wells took rooms of her own in Bloomsbury. She wanted to write.
Her stories, which Wells calls “wistful” and “very charming” and “sweet”, are in fact filled with straightforward expressions of pain. They are populated with wives comfortably abandoned, tactfully ignored, “enshrined” in charming houses. The Beautiful House, which ran in March 1912 under the name “Catherine Wells,” is about the ache of a woman watching her beloved with a lover.
In one of her stories, a handsome young photographer who comes to photograph a famous husband sets in motion an overwhelming longing in his wife. Wells wrote that Jane lacked the sensual strength and imagination to have a vivid sexual life. “Catherine”, who penned these stories, was a stranger to him.
Jane's story Walled Garden describes a healthy, vivacious woman whose rather effete literary husband announces that he is going to rename her “Rosalind”. She says flirtatiously, “Baptise me then!” and imagines them splashing each other with water, but instead he kisses her solemnly on the forehead. Their wedding night contains a revelation: “Bray made love to her delicately and reverently, and Rosalind, after an interval of puzzled discovery, settled down to her married life with a feeling of faint disappointment which she could hardly justify.”
After Jane became ill with cancer in the winter of 1927, Wells tried to stay close to her, remaining at Easton for long stretches, though he escaped for a few weekends in France with a mistress, Odette Kuehn.
In the days after Jane's death, Wells crafted a formal oration for her funeral. George Bernard Shaw's wife, Charlotte, a close friend of Jane's, complained: “He drowned us in a sea of misery and, as we were gasping, began a panegyric of Jane which made her appear as a delicate, flowerlike, gentle being surrounding itself with beauty, and philanthropy, and love. Now Jane was one of the strongest characters I ever met.”
Twenty years later, when West heard that Wells had died in the middle of the night, she would still muster a stream of violent, contradictory feeling: “He was a devil, he ruined my life. He starved me, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for 34 years. We should never have met, I was the only person he cared to see to the end. I feel desolate because he has gone.”
©Katie Roiphe. This is an abridged chapter from Uncommon Arrangements, Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, published by Virago on June 5, £12.99. Available for £11.65 from Times BooksFirst, 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
