West End Extra Letters" HG Wells | Permissive society

Publications by New Journal Enterprises

Home

Archive

Competition

West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 18 July 2008

HG Wells as the founder of the permissive society? I think not!

• THANKS but no thanks to Gerald Isaaman for his review (left) of Uncommon Arrangements, Katie Roiphe’s book, (HG Wells’ time as a sex machine, July 11).
Despite being something of a Wells scholar (I am the processor of the papers of his eminent political friend and journalist Charles Masterman), I am not uncritical of Wells.
He could be intolerably arrogant and callous.
But when it comes to sexual freedom, Mr Isaaman is so fashionably censorious while clearly savouring hypocritically the salacious details of different households that he fails to give the reader necessary offsetting details.
Rebecca West, in fact, pursued HG Wells and both of their journalism benefited from their expressed
pro-suffragette/free
love early radicalism against the rather puritanical Liberal Asquith government.
If anyone was heartless it was Rebecca West, as people like Lucy Masterman (Charles’s wife), saw the pain she deliberately caused for Jane, Wells’ longstanding consort.
Mr Isaaman further sounds off against Wells for a “hypocritical” passion for the “nubile” Amber Reeves in Hampstead.
Oh come, come, sir. Again there is every evidence that Amber was just as much a conscious, willing participant as HG was.
HG Wells was not the founder of the 1960s “permissive society” and dare I say, as a child of the 1960s (born 1954) that that era was preferable to today’s increasingly repressive England.
Does Mr Isaaman really want a return to this repression of men and women alike?
Lawrence Iles
Salisbury Road, Eastbourne

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld.
Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

Comment on this article.
(You must supply your full name and email address for your comment to be published)

Name:

Email:

Comment:

Your comments: