Review #46 - Ann Veronica by H G Wells

This is an Edwardian book about a girl called Ann Veronica who's father forbids her from studying Biology at Imperial so she goes to London by herself to become a student. However, while she is there she falls in love with one of the professors.

This is a really, really good book but I did have a concern about it. That, however, didn't stop it becoming really important to me as a book. It left me wanting to buy an actual copy and being one of the five to ten books I take to university next year. It was just this perfect balance between being pro-women's-rights/feminism and wanting to be a mother and part of the "classic female" roles.

Ann Veronica is one of my favourite female characters of all time because she is strong and resourceful especially in the time that the book was written. I really liked how she wouldn't conform because she felt that it was oppressive and really a really good reflection on H G Wells. Also, there is a part of me that feels very similar to Ann Veronica vis-à-vis an obsession with London and wanting to do a Biology degree etc.  There was also this contrast between her strength and her naivety which I loved.

The sentence construction was really beautiful "Were I a painter of subject pictures, I would exhaust all my skill in proportion and perspective and atmosphere upon the august seat of empire, I would present it grey and dignified and immense and respectable beyond any mere verbal description, and then in vivid black and very small, I would put in those valiantly impertinent vans, squatting at the base of its altitudes and pouring out a swift straggling rush of ominous little black objects, minute figures of determined women at war with the universe." My favourite parts were the bits where Ann Veronica was in love: "and now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in love - in love! that marvellous state!" They were just really, really powerful and captures it so so perfectly.

It did go on a bit but that is my only criticism. It isn't one for people who get bored easily.

There is a fabulous paper on feminism and femininity in Ann Veronica by L.S. Limanta (spoiler-full though) so if you do want to read that (or just skim it) click here

I would recommend this if:

You want to read more Edwardian Literature

You want to read a book that captures female life so wonderfully

You want a book that reads freaking beautifully.

Buy it here

I gave this four stars

"I wonder" said Ann Veronica at last "if I am beautiful? I wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a translucent goddess?"

She wondered why he was so distinctive, so unlike other men, and it never occurred to her for some time that this might be because she was falling in love with him.

"I want to be a person" said Ann Veronica to the Downs and the open sky; "I will not have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place."