The Great State: Essays in Construction.

WELLS, H.G.; Frances Evelyn Warwick; L.G. Chiozza Money; E. Ray Lankester; C.J. Bond; et al. [Rebecca West].

$22,500.00

Item Number: 147763

London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912.

Exceptional association copy of this compilation of political essays by H.G. Wells, Frances Evelyn Warwick and many others. Octavo, original cloth. Later printing. Association copy, inscribed by H.G. Wells on the front free endpaper, “Rebecca West from H.G. Wells 1913 There are some pictures inside (Personal & Confidential only to be shown to really safe people like Taylor).” Wells has added original drawings and doodles to over 40 pages of the book, mostly cartoons drawn on blanks, in margins, or in blank spaces before or after chapter headings, often expressing humorous and sometimes cheeky comments on nearby printed text, occasionally with holograph captions or dialogue. The recipient, Rebecca West was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. In the September 19, 1912 issue of the feminist weekly, The Freewoman, Rebecca West responded to H.G. Wells’s new novel Marriage by attacking the author, writing that he “… is the Old Maid among novelists; even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica … like cold white sauce was merely Old Maids’ mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships…” Wells found this provocation too enticing to resist, inviting her to visit and discuss her review of his book. The result of the meeting was a decade-long love affair and a son, Anthony–mostly with the knowledge if not consent of Wells’s wife, Amy Catherine Robbins. In very good condition.

Wells wrote in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934) that often, "in the evening, with my writing things before me I would break off work to do 'picshuas', these silly little sketches about this or that incident which became at last a sort of burlesque diary of our lives and accumulated in boxes until there were hundreds of them..." A selection of these "picshuas" were featured in Gene and Margaret Rinkel's 2006 book: The Picshuas of H. G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary.