Ann Veronica

Ann Veronica – H. G. Wells – Ann Veronica is a novel by H. G. Wells about Ann Veronica Stanley, a young woman who rebels against her father's rule. Ann leaves home after her father forbids her to attend a fancy dress ball. She moves into her own apartment and continues her studies in Biology. Set in Victorian London, it evokes the suffrage movement that was going on in Great Britain at the time, and there is a part in the book where Ann devotes herself to this cause and ends up spending time in prison. She returns home, seemingly ready to acquiesce to her previous life, but after becoming engaged to a man she does not love, she takes a leap of faith and breaks off the engagement and declares her love to a man she met whilst studying Biology instead. The novel was considered a scandalous work by many in its day and was denounced as 'capable of poisoning the minds of those who read it' by The Spectator.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the "father of science fiction.

During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the «Shakespeare of science fiction», while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a «wild talent».

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed «Wells's law» – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as «O Realist of the Fantastic!». His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.