“I’M REALLY A SINGULARLY UNPATRIOTIC PERSON AND EVEN IN THE WAR I’M PRO EUROPE...” WELLS (H. G., 1866-1946, Novelist)

Fine Autograph Letter Signed to Ferdinand LEIPNIK (1869-1924, Spy, Art Historian, Entrepeneur) saying he “would like to meet you. I’m really a singularly unpatriotic person & even in the war I am pro Europe & pro civilisation rather than pro British. There is great danger of all the fine possibilities[?] of the war being swamped in purely natural passion. Could you come to me down here for the next week end August 28th-30th & talk?...”, 1 side 4to., with original autograph envelope, Litttle Easton Rectory, Dunmow headed paper, no date, probably August

Wells was an outspoken socialist from a young age, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. In his later years, he wrote less fiction and more works expounding his political and social views, sometimes giving his profession as that of journalist. During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, Wells published a number of articles in London newspapers that subsequently appeared as a book entitled The War That Will End War. He coined the expression with the idealistic belief that the result of the war would make a future conflict impossible.
He was married twice, briefly to his cousin Isobel Mary (1865-1931) from 1891 to 1894 when he fell in love with one of his students Amy Catherine Robbins (1872–1927, later known as Jane), with whom he moved to Woking, Surrey, in May 1895. Jane died on 6th October 1927, in Dunmow, at the age of 55, which left Wells devastated. He also had Wells had multiple love affairs. Dorothy Richardson was a friend with whom he had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and miscarriage, in 1907. Wells' wife had been a schoolmate of Richardson. In December 1909, he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society. Between 1910 and 1913, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim was one of his mistresses. In 1914, he had a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, 26 years his junior. In 1920–21, and intermittently until his death, he had a love affair with the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger. Between 1924 and 1933 he partnered with the 22-year-younger Dutch adventurer and writer Odette Keun, with whom he lived in Lou Pidou, a house they built together in Grasse, France. Wells dedicated his longest book to her. Then, when visiting Maxim Gorky in Russia 1920, he had slept with Gorky's mistress Moura Budberg, then still Countess Benckendorf and 27 years his junior. In 1933, when she left Gorky and emigrated to London, their relationship renewed and she cared for him through his final illness. Wells repeatedly asked her to marry him, but Budberg strongly rejected his proposals.

Item Date:  1916

Stock No:  42563      £775

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