Disclosures: Gender, Identities, and Difference in H. G. Wells
27 September 2025
Voluntary Action Islington, 200A Pentonville Road, London N1 9JP
and online via Zoom
In his Autobiography H. G. Wells describes his wife Catherine (Jane) as someone who ‘dreamt and wrote and sought continually . . . for something she felt she had lost of herself or missed or never attained.’ The publication of Catherine Wells’s The Open Heart provides an opportunity to reconsider H. G. Wells’s understanding of gender, difference, and human (and ambiguous or non-human) identities, from Weena in The Time Machine to the cosmically altered human beings of Star Begotten.
When Wells described the outlook for homo sapiens as a ‘race between education and catastrophe’, did he suppose that education could lead to the emergence of new or improved human beings? How far, in his life and in his writings, was he, like George Ponderevo in Tono-Bungay, a ‘spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses’? How have his portrayals of sex, gender, and human and non-human identities influenced other writers and opinion-formers, both in his time and subsequently? How important is the idea of the ‘alien’ to our understanding of Wells?
- Women and gender in Wells’s fiction: science fiction, comic fiction, ‘discussion novels’, and others.
- Wells’s views on marriage, the family and feminist politics; the role of women in Wells’s utopias.
- Wells and non-binary and non-normative gender categories, and the stretching of gender boundaries.
- Wells’s relationships with the women in his life, and his autobiographical accounts of these relationships.
- Wells’s influence on, and presence in, novels by women, both during his lifetime and subsequently.
- Wells’s influence on our ideas of alien and supernatural identity, and of space and time in the formation of identity; modern applications of Wells’s ideas in these areas.
We have some fascinating speakers, including keynotes from:
Prof. Angelique Richardson, University of Exeter
Specialist in the history of science and literature; contributor to documentaries including BBC Four’s Victorian Sensations; author of After Darwin (2013).
Prof. Lesley Hall, University College London
Honorary Associate Professor at UCL’s Dept. of Science and Technology Studies, specialist in gender and sexuality in 19C and 20C Britain, currently researching progressive figures in interwar Britain.
Plus… a Q&A with Dr. Aaron B. Daniels
Editor of A Phenomenology of the Alien Encounters with the Weird and Inscrutable Other (2025).
If you’d like to join us, please use the Microsoft Form using the link here: https://forms.office.com/e/WBdMCQ7sAp
[In-person] £60 (£55 retired/student/unwaged), including tea, coffee and a sandwich lunch (likely Pret A Manger). Please let us know if you have any dietary requirements.
[Zoom] £35 (£30 retired/student/unwaged). For technical reasons, we can only guarantee that you will be able to view the live presentations in the main Conference Room (and not parallel events in the Training Room).
You can book and pay online (preferred). For the payment details, please use the Microsoft Form.We look forward to meeting you!