propagandist, he has done his utmost to explain and to glorify that
attitude of his. Perhaps I shrink from that word "purpose" too
sensitively, because it is so naturally associated in the mind with
all that is clumsy and didactic in fiction. The "novel with a
purpose," as the dreadful phrase has it, is a horrible thing, and none
of this five could be so misdescribed. Nevertheless it is very plain
that Mr Wells has deliberately selected his stories and his characters
to illustrate certain points of view. The characters are consistent,
and the story growing out of their influences and reactions is never
distorted in order to score a point for the maintainer of a theory.
But the preliminary selection cannot be overlooked. It has, without
question, been made in each case to illustrate a thesis.

_Ann Veronica_ (1909) opens an aspect of the sex question that has
been amplified in later novels. The chief person in the story
illustrates for us the revolt of young women against the limitations
of a certain, the most representative, type of home discipline. Ann
Veronica was a well-educated young woman with that leaning towards
biological science which seems an almost necessary element in the
make-up of Mr Wells' 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 elem