Abstract
H G Wells’s obituary in The Times states that he was ‘never anything but successful as a writer, and at one time he was possibly the most widely read author in the world’.1 His obituary in the Times Literary Supplement describes him, as an ‘educator’, who ‘spoke more clearly than any other man to the youth of the world’.2 Such accolades may, when taken together, offer an insight into Wells’s creative vision, and the choices he made to be both artistically and socially viable. This chapter will examine this dual purpose in relation to The Sea Lady (1902), a work that depicts the influence of both the Victorian popular taste for the fey and the gothic, while also looking forward to many of the concerns that would come to be associated with modernism: the dissatisfaction with the direction of modern life, in particular the commodification of human beings, the desire for a greater spiritual and sexual freedom, and the move away from the traditional novelistic conclusion to reflect the ongoing nature of life. It will consider Wells as an author driven by his social ideals to reach as wide a readership as possible, and to find a means to consider complex political and cultural tropes in a way that would be popular, but would also be artistically sound. Through a text that was both entertaining and through its depiction of the fantastic, apparently removed from the everyday existence of his reading public, Wells sought to seduce his readers to consider the possibility of what his heroine describes as ‘better dreams’.3 The middlebrow then becomes for Wells a potential siren call, with which to entice his readership to consider another way of life.
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Notes
Wells, H G, The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine (1902), Stover, L. (ed. and notes) (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 98.
Woolf, V, ‘Middlebrow’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Woolf, L. (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 113–19, 115.
Parrinder, P, (ed.) H G Wells: Collected Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972), 12.
Wells, H G, ‘The Contemporary Novel’, in An Englishman Looks at the World (London: Cassell and Company, 1914), 148–69; 153, 164, 169. This, despite Woolf’s pronouncement in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923), that the Edwardians, including Wells, were a generation of novelists where ‘character disappeared or was mysteriously engulfed’ (Woolf, V, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in Selected Essays, Bradshaw, D. (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32–6, 32).
Sherborne, M, H G Wells: Another Kind of Life (London: Peter Owen Ltd, 2010), 119.
Orr, L, James’s The Turn of the Screw (London: Continuum, 2009), 15, 69–70.
Hughes, W, Bram Stoker: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2009), 84.
Hurley, K, ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’, in Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Hogle, J E (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189–208, 199.
Quoted in Bradshaw, D, ‘“The Purest Ecstacy”: Virginia Woolf and the Sea’, in Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, Feigel, L and A Harris (eds.) (Witney: Peter Lang, 2009), 112.
Joyce, J, Dubliners (1914) (London: Penguin, 2000), 9.
Rose, J, ‘Education, Literacy and the Victorian Reader’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, Brantlinger, P and W B Thesing (eds) (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 31–47.
Wells, H G, Mankind in the Making (1903) (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006), 234.
Drabble, M, J Stringer and D Hahn, ‘Modernism’, in The Concise Oxford Companion to Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 476–77, 476.
Habermann, I, Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestly, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 32.
Ferguson, R, The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 46.
du Maurier, D, Rebecca (1938) (London: Vintage, 2003), 1.
Wells, H G, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), Volumes 1 and 2. (London: Gollancz and the Cresset Press, 1934), 468.
Silver, C G, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8.
Andersen, H C, Fairy Tales: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 106.
Gibbons, S, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) (London: Penguin, 2006), 113.
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© 2015 Emma Miller
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Miller, E. (2015). H G Wells’s The Sea Lady and the Siren Call of the Middlebrow. In: Macdonald, K., Singer, C. (eds) Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486776_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486776_7
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