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?
We invite proposals, either for 20-minute papers or for brief (5-minutes) presentations, on the following topics, among others:
- 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.
Please submit proposals (up to 200 words) to emelynegodfrey@yahoo.com with copy to secretaryhgwellssociety@hotmail.com by 1 June 2025, accompanied by a mini biography and let us know whether you would like to give your paper online or in person. We look forward to meeting you!