Dr. Emelyne Godfrey & Prof. Patrick Parrinder

Join us with Flame tree Press and editors Dr. Emelyne Godfrey and Prof. Patrick Parrinder to celebrate the publication of The Open Heart by Catherine Wells. To purchase a signed copy click here – The event is free to enter but please reserve a place as space is limited.

Catherine Wells (1872–1927) was the wife of H.G. Wells and the author of short stories, poems and an unfinished novella, The Open Heart, a haunting study of a woman’s sense of unfulfilment that adds significantly to our knowledge of early 20th-century feminism. Published here for the first time, The Open Heart is brought together with her stories and poems that appeared in The Book of Catherine Wells (1928)

The Open Heart tells of a woman’s shipwreck on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean, a kind of earthly paradise in which she finds herself entirely alone. Included, too, in this collection are Catherine Wells’ highly accomplished tales of forbidden love, of a woman’s subjection to a dominant and possessive husband and of female despair. These stories illustrate what H.G. Wells called ‘her brooding tenderness’, her ‘sense of invincible fatality’ and her ‘predisposition towards a haunting, dreamland fantasy of fear’.