Customer Reviews

The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

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This is my absolute favorite of all amongst Wells' social novels. Yes, he's best known for his science fiction now, but he had a genuinely brilliant eye for social satire. In my opinion, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is his funniest, despite some indirect hints of anti-Semitism in his sometimes stereotypical portrait of Sir Issac himself.

He is not the main character, however: his wife Ellen is, as she gropes her way from a child-bride's terrified dependency upon her husband's will to finding a life and work of her own, with the help of a bumblingly romantic writer of domestic comedies. (Unlike several of Wells' other novels of women's intellectual growth, Ellen does not end up falling madly in love with a scientifically-minded iconoclast bearing a suspicious resemblance to Wells, thank goodness.) Occasionally, the writer character gets a trifle preachy, but who could resist a protagonist who suddenly declares herself a suffragette and smashes the nearest shop window because the time in jail means a holiday from her husband?

Well worth the read, in short.

This is what it says it is: a public domain text with navigation that allows the user to easily navigate the entire book, providing forward, backward and cross links to every section of the book. Most public domain texts (and far too many new texts) are just plain texts rendered into the Kindle format. This text was carefully constructed to fit the structure of this book.