The Open Heart: Stories & Poetry of Catherine Wells

Published for the first time, The Open Heart is a telling tale of unfulfilment from the supportive, but long-neglected wife of H.G. Wells.

Catherine Wells (1872-1927) was the wife of H.G. Wells and the author of short stories, poems and 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 brought together with her stories and poems that appeared in The Book of Catherine Wells (1928).

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. Included, too, in this collection are Catherine Wells’ 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 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.

Catherine Wells (1872-1927), born Amy Catherine Robbins, worked as a teacher and studied at Tutorial College, Holborn where she met and later married H.G. Wells. She is regarded as a great supporter of her husband’s literary outpourings, while quietly her creating her own stories, long-neglected until now.

Emelyne Godfrey, PhD, is Chairperson of the H.G. Wells Society. She is author of Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012). In 2014 she edited The Convert, the first suffragette novel, originally published in 1907. Most recently, she was editor of Utopiasand Dystopiasin the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris (2016).

Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and President of the H.G. Wells Society. He is the author of many books on H.G. Wells, science fiction, and modern literature and is General Editor of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English (2011-24).