_Ann Veronica_ (1909) opens an aspect of the sex question that has been amplified in later novels. The chief person in the story illustrates for us the revolt of young women against the limitations of a certain, the most representative, type of home discipline. Ann Veronica was a well-educated young woman with that leaning towards biological science which seems an almost necessary element in the make-up of Mr Wells' exemplars of the open mind. She came to an open quarrel with her father on the question of attending a somewhat Bohemian fancy-dress ball, and she had the courage and determination to uphold her declaration of independence. She ran away, came up to London from her father's suburb, took lodgings and essayed quite unsuccessfully to make her own living. She failed in this endeavour because she had not been educated or trained for any of those few and specialised occupations that women may attempt in modern conditions. She learned by experience various essentials that had been omitted from any teaching she had received at home, and ended that phase of her life by falling in love with Capes, demonstrator at the Westminster Imperial College, a man who was living apart from his wife. Ann Veronica's story is the first serious essay in feminism--a term that takes a much wider meaning in Mr Wells' definition than is commonly attributed to it. The novel presents the claim of the woman to free herself from the restrictions that once almost necessarily limited her sphere of action, restrictions that are ever becoming more meaningless in a civilisation that has enforced new economic conditions. But Mr Wells goes far beyond that elementary proposition. He has tried in _Ann Veronica_--and again with a more delicate probe in _Marriage_ and _The Passionate Friends_--to touch the hidden thing that is causing all this surface inflammation. He has analysed and diagnosed the exposed evil, always it seems with a certain tentativeness, and we are left to carry on his line of research; many of the difficulties of the problem are indicated, but no sovereign specific for the malady.