The Wife of Sir Isaac HarmanWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
It would be quite easy for anyone with the knack of reserve to go on
from this point with a history of Lady Harman that would present her as
practically a pure philanthropist. For from these beginnings she was
destined to proceed to more and more knowledge and understanding and
clear purpose and capable work in this interesting process of
collective regrouping, this process which may even at last justify Mr.
Brumley’s courageous interpretations and prove to be an early
experiment in the beginning of a new social order. Perhaps some day
there will be an official biography, another addition to the
inscrutable records of British public lives, in which all these things
will be set out with tact and dignity. Horatio Blenker or Adolphus
Blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial task. She will
be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent
purpose in life from her very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her
relations with Sir Isaac will be rescued from reality. The book will be
illustrated by a number of carefully posed photographer’s photographs
of her, studies of the Putney house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut
of her early home at Penge. The aim of all British biography is to
conceal. A great deal of what we have already told will certainly not
figure in any such biography, and still more certainly will the things
we have yet to tell be missing.
Lady Harman was indeed only by the force of circumstances and
intermittently a pure philanthropist, and it is with the intercalary
passages of less exalted humanity that we are here chiefly concerned.
At times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and
becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which
was her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and
dignified figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of
nothingness, while the errant soul of the woman within strayed into
less exalted ways of thinking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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