yes-to-day

Is Barbara Harris Today’s Margaret Sanger?

a lively and entertaining writer wrote about Wells

The life of H.G. Wells is, in many ways, a gift to a novelist: He was a self-made man who became famous and wealthy, who knew practically everybody (Shaw! Gorky! Lenin!) and had sex with many of them (Rebecca West! Elizabeth von Arnim! Margaret Sanger! a Russian spy!), provoking no shortage of scandal....
If Wells had not existed, an enterprising novelist might have had to invent him. An outspoken champion of socialism and free love (and a formidable practitioner of the latter), Wells is already a larger-than-life character, to the point that only his intelligent, forbearing second wife can begin to match him....
Jane, the second wife, who failed to share Wells’s sexual appetite, but who not only tolerated his dalliances but offered frequent advice to all concerned, is the quiet star of the book.

The Globe&Mail: fiction review