She long’d her hidden passions to reveal, And tell her pains, but had not words to tell: She can’t begin, but waits for the rebound, To catch his voice, and to return the sound.
Ovid, Metamorphosis
A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own.
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (1987)
WHEN FLORENCE DEEKS RETURNED with her sister Mabel to Toronto in the early summer of 1933, the consuming passion of her life was spent. At first she had felt herself to be the victim of a plagiarist, then a pawn in the games played by lawyers. Ultimately, she came to believe herself to be a casualty of the system of British justice. In the final, frantic months of her quest for that justice, her activities, arising out of sincerity and conviction, had bordered on outright farce.
She experienced it as tragedy. In front of her lay the prospect of an old age of thwarted ambitions and sullied dreams. She had put almost all of her energy since the age of fifty into “The Web” and her desire to see it published. For the rest of her life, it sat untouched in her home, a court exhibit with its own silent past.
After they returned to Toronto, the sisters rested for a few weeks. Florence’s experience with the law, and the essential injustice done to her, became the subject of conversation at family gatherings. After all, her tangle with the courts had eventually involved most of the older members of the Deeks family. It seems clear from letters Mabel wrote home from England that her sister Annie and her brother Charles, as well as her sister-in-law Helen, had contributed to their loved ones’ lengthy stay abroad. Family lore later had it that by the time the various appeals had run their course, the total cost to the family had reached $100,000. At the end of the twentieth century, the equivalent value of this sum would exceed $750,000.1 Who knows what unkind words came to be uttered just beyond Florence’s hearing, what brooding family resentments her past bore upon her future?
Despite her devastating setback, Florence continued to harbour ambitions to be the author of a published work of history. In fact, on the way home from England she and Mabel had disembarked in New Jersey so that Florence could see editors at Scribner’s in Manhattan about the prospect of a new book. But before she wrote it, a different story needed to be told: the tangled tale of “The Web,” its origins, and its fate in the hands of men responsible for administering English-speaking justice.
Florence spent the remainder of 1933 and part of 1934 writing of this experience. A wealth of court documents was at hand, and she prepared others, one called “Treatment Given by Privy Council,” as aids. When finished, the typescript occupied two thick volumes. One consisted of an account of the case; the other, of the reports of her literary experts. The first of these alone was 246 single-spaced pages long. Clearly, she had aspirations to see it published in book form, for in the spring of 1934 she corresponded with the popular historian T.G. Marquis, and he offered advice about a possible structure and the essential “plot” of her story.2 She may have taken her completed manuscript to local publishers, but if so, they did not accept it. Eventually, like “The Web” and her other papers, it simply collected dust.
In the mid-1930s, she made several attempts to write a work of comprehensive history, but whether called “The March of Civilization” or “Wings over the World,” they resembled any number of textbooks on “Western civilization” available by then.3 Among her surviving papers for the year 1935 are letters from several publishers and authors, including the historians James Harvey Robinson and Sir Percy Ashley as well as the classicist Ernest Barker. Each granted permission to quote passages from his books.4
The new project went nowhere. Florence was now in her seventies, and the fire had gone. Mabel continued to believe that the effort would have been worthwhile. “I think she was too discouraged … that Macmillans had taken her manuscript and the rich market and the glory that belonged to her,” she wrote many years later. “When I know how she worked and what she accomplished and how interested she was in her work and the result it would bring, I cannot help feeling as I do. I was her constant companion all through her legal work and she needed me – I do not know what might have happened had she been alone. We would not let her go out alone in the evening, not even to the post box half a block away.”5
Mabel’s sad but caring words hint at family worries about the health of Florence, and at the heavy toll her struggle had exacted on her, in mind as well as in body.
At this point, Florence Deeks all but disappears from view. Many of her papers contain information about her experience with publishers, lawyers, and the courts, but scarcely any of them tell us what we need to know. What occupied her for the remainder of her long life? What were her interests? Fragments of romantic novels, some co-authored with Mabel, have survived, and they record the continuing influence of the early years in Morrisburg, and the Loyalist myth that enveloped the town, on the sisters’ imaginations. Perhaps the life of exile from a land of abundance and the story of survival in the face of hardship found resonance in these maiden aunts, confronting the privations of genteel poverty and the infirmities of old age. After Annie died in 1937, at the age of eighty, the two remaining sisters found a way to subsist on the strict economies exacted by their combined income of $1,200 per year.
In contrast, their three nephews reached maturity with no hint of want. Upon his marriage in 1930, George Campbell Deeks, the eldest son of George and Helen, gave his bride a diamond and ruby pendant and the couple took up residence in Toronto’s affluent Forest Hill Village. For the rest of his life he served the firm of investment dealers he had joined after leaving university. Eventually he held several corporate directorships.6 He was the one to whom Florence and Mabel turned whenever things needed fixing on Farnham Avenue. And like his father before him, he did his best to help.
During the Second World War, Campbell served as a reserve officer of the Forty-Eighth Highlanders of Canada. Douglas twice won the rank of major while overseas during the war, once with the Fifth Wing battle school and a second time with the Forty-Eighth Highlanders in Italy, where he was wounded in action. Trained as an engineer, Edward founded Dominion Metalware Industries in 1940.
The brothers made successes of themselves and, like their parents, later contributed time and resources to charitable and philanthropic causes, such as the Victory Loan campaign, the United Appeal, and Boys’ Village. Their mother, Helen, lived to 1945, when she died at the age of seventy-one. While her nephews forged their way in the public world, Florence remained, with Mabel, in the privacy of her own space behind the curtains at 140 Farnham Avenue, trapped in the skein of memories associated with “The Web.”
Autobiography has traditionally been the preserve of men who, for reasons of their own, choose to write about their development as individuals. The sense they usually have had of themselves is that of individuation and autonomy: the Augustinian self at war with evil; the Rousseauian self at odds with society – the “essential self,” the imperial self. Florence, like most other women, did not view herself in these terms. Female identity has traditionally been grounded, in the words of the feminist historian and critic Mary G. Mason, “through relation to the chosen other.”7 Yet it is one matter to feel this way, and quite another to express the sentiment. What was the “chosen other” of Florence Deeks?
Had she married and become a mother, Florence might have written of her life in terms of domesticity and family, of a life lived in relation to husband and children. The longing to love was always strong in her. But at a certain point in her life, for reasons of her own, she had chosen to remain unattached. In her own way, in the 1890s she had become a “new woman,” not unlike Amy Catherine Robbins.
Florence found her sense of self in her hard labour as an amateur historian and her lengthy encounter with publishers, the legal profession, and the law. Above all, she developed a clear identification with the women embodied collectively in “The Web.” Florence’s “chosen other” resided there, in the way she had managed to place woman at the forefront of history and to give her a voice.
By the time her struggle with the courts ended in 1933, the sense of self-worth and confidence that had swelled within her during the years of work on “The Web” was gone. On the advice of literary men, she had earlier removed women from their central place in the narrative of “The Highway of History.” Now, when she attempted to tell of the “literary tragedy” that had befallen her, she lacked a means of articulating her personal voice, one that would keep her at the centre of her own story.
She did write one document that began “I, Florence Amelia Deeks,” around 1930, but she intended it to help her lawyer and serve her cause, not her self. Three paragraphs about her origins, family, education, and interests gave way within a page to the story of “The Web” and the men who had handled it. In its more sustained version, as “The Case: A Literary Tragedy,” written after the Privy Council decision, Florence presented herself only as a figure subordinated to the central “character,” her unpublished history of the world. Family and friends appeared in it only at fleeting moments, when in some way they served the cause.
Instead, several men took it upon themselves to tell the story of Florence Deeks, and they had little good to say about her or her quest for justice. Each in his own way provided the case for the defence. In doing so, they proved incapable of conceiving, much less comprehending, that there could be another perspective, another version of the life and labours of the woman about whom they wrote with such presumption.
Throughout the period when the Deeks case was before the Privy Council, and during the months that followed, Wells spent much of his time at his French villa putting the finishing touches on the telling of his own story, published in 1934 as Experiment in Autobiography. It set the interpretive framework for subsequent published accounts of the litigious lady from the Dominions. When the time came for the first mention of the woman who had plagued him so, the wordsmith expressed himself carefully. Florence Deeks, he said, was “a Canadian spinster who conceived the strange idea that she held the copyright to human history.”
Wells was fully aware that the image of the frustrated and neurotic spinster remained a popular stereotype. Indeed, it had gained new currency in the age of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Miss Deeks had reminded him, Wells said, of Miss Flite of Dickens’s Bleak House, “in the way she fussed about with her lawyers, with much whispering and rustling of papers.” But he could just as easily have drawn his allusion from the pages of The Odd Women, the “spinster novel” of his friend George Gissing, or, for that matter, from Trial by Jury, with Gilbert and Sullivan’s harsh caricature of the “rich attorney’s elderly, ugly daughter.” And so, Wells suggested, with little hope and not much more to do with her life, Miss Deeks had found an outlet for her thwarted desires and had pursued them to the point of obsession and beyond. She was, he said, “quite honest but vain and foolish,” a “faintly pathetic” figure.
The high moral ground remained his. “Life is too short and there is too much to do in it,” he informed his readers, “for me to spend time and attention in hunting out whatever poor little assets Miss Deeks may have preserved from her own lawyers and expert advisers. She has to go on living somehow and her mischief is done. I hope she is comfortable and that she is still persuaded she is a sort of intellectual heroine.”8
In fact, H.G. Wells had been decidedly less charitable than he let on concerning the disposition of Miss Deeks’s remaining assets. He knew these were negligible, but as late as July 1933 he had instructed his legal representatives to secure them from her in any way possible, including forced bankruptcy. “It seems strange to Mr. Wells,” his secretary wrote to his solicitor John A. Gedge, “that he can be pestered by this sort of thing while he cannot extract a penny from Miss Deeks. Mr. Wells asks if you are quite satisfied that everything has been done which can be done in the matter of costs.”9
Canadian observers fleshed out Wells’s brief but memorable sketch of the Canadian spinster. In his own way, Hector Charlesworth merely expanded on the interpretation initially placed on the Deeks story by Wells. In 1937 the veteran journalist and critic was in the midst of preparing a third volume in his “candid chronicles” of people he had known and events he had witnessed during his long career as journalist. During the 1920s, Hugh Eayrs had published the first highly successful volumes, and he looked forward to the third, to be called I’m Telling You, not least because it contained two lengthy chapters harshly critical of the plaintiff in the case of Deeks v. Wells.
To help Charlesworth prepare his account, Hugh Eayrs and W.W. McLaughlin had provided Charlesworth with access to trial records and other documents. The journalist used them to such good effect that they feared Florence Deeks might sue. Eayrs made certain that McLaughlin read Charlesworth’s text in order to delete libellous passages. They decided to keep in the passage about the woman’s purchase, return, and repurchase of The Outline of History from Eaton’s. It was amusing. McLaughlin had pleaded that Charlesworth be made to tone down his severe judgment on the extravagance of William Irwin’s testimony, but he did so only because Irwin was married to his cousin. Eayrs insisted that Charlesworth’s words remain intact. “After all consider my dear boy what this whole thing cost us,” Eayrs wrote in one of his “Dear Billy” letters, “and really and truly Raney’s view was that of most reasonably intelligent people.” In contrast, the publisher and the lawyer agreed to soften Charlesworth’s account elsewhere in his collection of the premier of Ontario, Mitchell Hepburn, in light of the company’s “intimate relations with the Provincial Government.”10
Charlesworth’s December 1920 review of The Outline of History in Saturday Night magazine had provided the first substantial Canadian assessment of the book. With the publication of I’m Telling You, and its chapters entitled “The Amazing Case of Deeks vs. Wells” and “Wells Vindicated At His Own Expense,” he furnished the basic account to which any subsequent chronicler of the affair had to turn. But Charlesworth’s point of view was strictly that of the case for Wells.
The corporate correspondence he was allowed to examine had been carefully selected. Eayrs and McLaughlin kept from Charlesworth any company records that might have hinted at the troubles during the years of Frank Wise – such as the statement Eayrs had secured from Miss Millership about Wise’s attempts to obtain the letters that were supposed to be “unfindable” in the company’s files. And of course they also kept from him any other troublesome internal correspondence. It would not do, for example, to let Charlesworth see the correspondence in which Eayrs himself had reported that John Saul had said that, with Wise’s approval, he might indeed have sent “The Web” to New York – or even to England. Full access to the company correspondence would have informed Charlesworth that even George Brett had thought “The Web” might have been sent to New York.
Charlesworth’s chapters on Deeks v. Wells served the purposes of author and publisher alike, and served them well. For Charlesworth, they provided a comic interlude in an otherwise fairly serious book of reminiscence. For Eayrs and his firm, they more or less ensured that no one in future would take the spinster’s claims seriously.
Frank Wise did not exist in Charlesworth’s story. The whereabouts of “The Web” during the months following John Saul’s resignation Charlesworth dismissed as “a minor mystery.” “The Web” had “clearly” been returned to Miss Deeks as early as February 1919. To think otherwise, Charlesworth proclaimed, was simply to go against the evidence. The “eminent experts” mentioned by Wells in his introduction to The Outline of History had provided “detailed assistance,” while the professorial experts Florence had retained, William Irwin in particular, had deluded themselves into supporting a fraudulent cause. She had been able to retain the distinguished lawyer R.S. Robertson, K.C., only because “she happened to have a brother of considerable means who was a great admirer of her literary abilities and a firm believer in the rectitude of her claim.”11
By such means, and with such skewed evidence and vested interest, something that appeared to be an authoritative version of the case took shape. It continued to build. In 1945, an amateur historian of progressive political sympathies wrote to H.G. Wells. Aware of Charlesworth’s portrayal of the Deeks trial, Edwin C. Guillet had decided to write his own account for his “Famous Canadian Trials” series. He had obtained the evidence and judgments from Osgoode Hall, and sent Wells the finished product of his research. He noted proudly that a journalist from the Globe and Mail had written a series of columns using information he had provided. Guillet had concluded that Florence Deeks’s charges were “ridiculous,” and the journalist, J.V. McAree, followed suit. The famous author, McAree said, had been the victim of “one of the most outrageous lawsuits ever instituted in Canada.”12
Guillet wrote several fawning letters to Wells with what he claimed to be “more or less secret information” on the background of the case: stories of the rich brother; of the $15,000 W.P.M. Kennedy was said to have received for his services as editor; of William Irwin as a “fundamentalist religious crank” eager to attack the progressive Wells. This much H.G. would have appreciated; but when Guillet asked for a photograph, Wells’s secretary wrote on the top of the letter: “It irritated Mr. W. so much to be asked for autographed portraits of himself like ‘some damned movie star’ that I am not putting it before him just now.” Seven months later, after writing several other equally ingratiating letters, Guillet received his photograph.13
Perhaps inspired by Toronto newspaper accounts of Deeks v. Wells, in the 1940s the American writer Channing Pollock chose to include the case with others he deemed to be frivolous or vexatious, or both, in an article published in the American Mercury. He called his piece “The Plagiarism Racket.”14 In this way, Florence Deeks came to be associated with all manner of cranks, frauds, and hucksters.
Such a view of the Deeks case continued to the end of the twentieth century, unchallenged. In 1999 a book called Toronto: A Literary Guide was published to critical acclaim. Its author was Greg Gatenby, artistic director of the International Festival of Authors. Organized according to neighbourhood and street, it contains an entry for 140 Farnham Avenue.15
Gatenby tells the story of a hapless lady who one summer day in 1918 set out from her home to deliver an “over-the-transom submission” to Macmillan of Canada and ended up suing H.G. Wells for plagiarism. “The case,” Gatenby assures his readers, “was absurd and that it lasted as long as it did is surely as astounding as the initial credibility given to any of Deeks’s claims … The case was finally put down like a sick dog, but not before it had cost all parties a great deal – and more than just cash.” A few lines later, Gatenby invokes the words of Hector Charlesworth, written in 1937, as final judgment on the matter. In the whole Deeks affair, Charlesworth tells a new generation of readers, “few gave consideration to the feelings and reputations of honourable men, who over a period of some years, had to face the accusation that they had been guilty of disgraceful conduct.”
It is difficult to blame Gatenby for taking Charlesworth’s conclusions at face value, for he merely repeated what history has stated to be truth. That is usually what amateur historians do. Donald Jones had told the same story in his 1992 book, Fifty Tales of Toronto. His was popular history, so it lacked the authority of the footnote; but the presence and authority of Hector Charlesworth lurked between the lines in that book, too.16
Half a century after Florence Deeks’s death, it has become possible to suggest a resolution to the mystery of “The Web.” She lost her case against H.G. Wells because the sizable body of intrinsic evidence suggesting a direct correspondence between the Deeks manuscript and The Outline of History came to be discounted. The direct evidence, the kind needed to prove that “The Web” had reached Wells, was judged insufficient to outweigh it. This was the verdict of the courts, but must it be the judgment of history?
Cases proceeding within the jurisdiction of civil rather than criminal law require a burden of proof based on a “balance of probabilities,” rather than on “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Historical records now available provide a far more comprehensive body of evidence than that heard in the courts. What, in the end, does it suggest?
If “The Web” was indeed sent to England – why, when, and to whom? How could it have reached Wells? The evidence leaves us with a series of hints that, when linked, point towards a concealed narrative. Propelled less by malicious conspiracy than by a mixture of helpful intent and self-preservation, it requires no particularly complicated scheme or complex network of villains. Instead, it involves a publisher and an editor currying favour, and a man helping his oldest and closest friend, just as he had done for many years …
John Saul has possessed “The Web” since the end of July 1918. At first he does not know what to do with it. He places it for the time being in the office vault. Its author, a Miss Deeks, has asked him to determine whether the lengthy extracts she has used from John Richard Green’s A Short History of the English People go beyond “fair use.” She does not wish to be accused of plagiarism. Copyright to Green’s work is held by Macmillan & Company, Limited, of London. But for all its substantial length and interesting material, her manuscript is not publishable in its present state. It lacks any apparatus of scholarship, is written in a romantic prose far too old-fashioned for readers who have gone through four years of war, and is so strident in its advocacy of the cause of woman and in its denigration of man that the likelihood of its acceptability as a school textbook is not great. So why trouble the London office? Saul goes on his fall sales trip to the western provinces, and “The Web” sits on the shelf. It is still there when he returns in mid-September.
The transatlantic publishing world, however, while intensely competitive, is also collegial. Co-publication arrangements require the sharing of confidences, even gossip – especially about the goings-on of authors who might make them money. Few authors generate publishers more income than does H.G. Wells, and Wells has a new project. Rumour has it that he is working on a popular history of the world, for use in schools, and that he might offer it to Brett in New York. It is now October 1918.
But Macmillan’s Toronto office already contains a history of the world more than 500 pages in length. What should an editor do under such circumstances? Should Wells not at least be made aware that another author is attempting to publish a book on the same subject? John Saul has some ideas, but he decides to speak with his employer, Frank Wise.
Neither publisher nor editor entirely trusts the other – Wise because there are affairs in the office he would rather keep to himself, Saul because he knows what is going on. He knows about the private company, Sales Unlimited, Wise has set up in the Macmillan building so that it could use Macmillan’s resources; knows about the hijinks in the Macmillan medical division, populated by shady characters like the one whose sole duty is to act as Wise’s personal chauffeur and factotum; knows about the dubious legality on which his British “cash for settlers” colonization scheme rests.
Nevertheless, they have maintained a good working relationship over their half-dozen years together. This particular October day is a chilly one, and Wise has kept a coal fire blazing in the brick fireplace in his office. The two men are seated comfortably in front of it, Wise in his favourite wicker chair, next to the coal scuttle. Saul has raised his problem of what to do about the Deeks manuscript. They are talking about Wells and “The Web,” mulling things over, when Wise has one of his better ideas, if once again a shady one. He knows he is in trouble with both Brett in New York and Sir Frederick in London over declining profits, and also over Mrs. Kipling’s threatened withdrawal of her husband’s books from the Macmillan list because of his boorish behaviour towards them. He fears that his superiors may one day discover his very private sales company or the dubious practices of the employees of his medical division. He senses that his future with the firm is less than secure, and he is fifty years old. What can he do to regain favour?
Wise and Saul are well aware that H.G. Wells has been a Macmillan author, but they know that the author had fallen out with Sir Frederick over poor promotion of one of his novels a number of years back. Might Wells be secured once again to the Macmillan stable if, through some friends in the firm, he is offered use of “The Web” in the writing of his own history? The Deeks manuscript is not publishable, not yet anyway, but it certainly contains a lot of good material. Would Wells, a wealthy author, see fit to provide some kind of reward for such a service? Wise is acutely conscious that he owes Macmillan hundreds of dollars that he has misspent or otherwise allocated for his personal use.17 He can certainly do with an unanticipated infusion of cash. So, for that matter, can Saul, whose passion for collecting rare books has kept him short of money.
And so, as Wise adds more coal to the fire, an idea takes shape. Saul, no innocent in these matters, will send “The Web” to England in such a way that it reaches Wells. For obvious reasons, it cannot be forwarded through regular channels – through Macmillan’s editorial division, for example. That might involve entry of the author’s name and title in the firm’s manuscript logbook – as in Toronto. The basic problem is who should be selected as the conduit to Wells. Each possibility involves some risk. Directly to Wells? Too dangerous, too much like the direct receipt of stolen goods. An approach to him would need to be more subtle than this. Through George Brett in New York? Why start the chain of transaction on the wrong side of the Atlantic? Besides, is Brett well enough acquainted with Wells? Through Sir Frederick? Out of the question. The Victorian sense of propriety of old Sir Frederick was in part what had alienated Macmillan from Wells and his amoral novels like Ann Veronica in the first place. He would be furious if sent “The Web” with the direct suggestion that Wells use it for the purpose of his own work of history.
No, what is needed is a transaction that can masquerade as merely part of the normal business of publishing, or at least can be explained as such by people like Sir Frederick, and even Wells, if things go wrong. They need to be in a position to distance themselves, if necessary – to be able to provide a plausible explanation of the presence of the Deeks manuscript in England should its whereabouts become known.
Who, then, to approach? Wise and Saul mull things over, sotto voce, searching for an answer. Wise’s office door is slightly ajar; but then only May Mercer, the president’s long-suffering but loyal secretary, is within hearing distance. And Wise knows she has heard and typed confidences of much more dubious legality than this.
“The Web” is with them. It rests on Frank Wise’s lap. He glances at the beginning of its first chapter, “The Dawn” – the strangest opening he has ever seen in a history book: the creation of the sun and the planets; the solar system; the cooling of the earth; its envelopment with “a gaseous fluid saturated with carbonic acid and nitrogen.” Pages on the slow evolution of the earth and its earliest prehistoric inhabitants. This is less the stuff of historians than of advocates of popular science.
Suddenly Wise knows where “The Web” should be sent: to Richard Gregory, with whom he has corresponded within the year. He has remembered that Gregory, one of the greatest and most popular scientific journalists of the day, is assistant editor of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, published by Macmillan and with its offices in Macmillan’s own building in St. Martin’s Street. He is also, conveniently, Macmillan’s education adviser, and is often consulted by Macmillan when non-fiction manuscripts touch upon his interests and expertise. It would be perfectly in order to send this manuscript to him – not exceptional at all. And Gregory is Wells’s oldest and most enduring friend, a pal since their schooldays together.
“The Web,” they decide, will be sent directly to Gregory, nominally to ask him to look over its early sections for scientific accuracy, but with the informal suggestion that Wells might find the manuscript of some benefit in his work on the new book. Perhaps a covering letter, easily disposable, is in order; one suggesting that, if Wells deems the manuscript to be of help, he might wish to reward those responsible for sending it to him. There is no reason why Gregory should think anything is particularly out of the ordinary or worrisome about this, particularly when he can help out a dear friend.
Transatlantic passage, even in wartime, seldom took longer than a week, and the efficiency of the British postal service was legendary, with several deliveries daily. A parcel originating in Toronto would be in its recipients’ hands in London easily within ten days.18 Near the end of October, Richard Gregory receives the package, along with its covering letter. Well acquainted with his friend’s domestic routine, he knows the division of labour in the Wells household. He does not send “The Web” to the author at his London flat. Nor does he trouble the great man as he holds forth at his table in the Reform Club. Instead, he forwards the labour of an author identified only as “Adul Weaver” to Easton Glebe.
Gregory has already received a request from Wells for information about the temperature of space and the diameter of the sun. A short while later, he provides the information in a letter sent to Wells’s London flat. He encloses a copy of his edition of Huxley’s Physiography, in the hope that H.G., as his friend puts it so unwittingly but so tellingly, will find it “of use in connection with the book you have in hand.”19
The book in hand is not the one that will become The Outline of History. Like others, Gregory knows that Wells has not yet begun to write the book. He has referred, instead, to “The Web.” It does not occur to him that there should be any reason why he should not acknowledge that the manuscript from Canada is in his friend’s possession.
Like that of Florence, the story of Jane Wells became one told by men. As she took refuge in the persona of Jane, the compliant wife of a great man with powerful needs, Catherine Wells gradually lost the capacity to express publicly her inner longings. After her death, her image would be fixed immediately in the public mind by the words her husband chose for his introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells. In this respect, H.G. Wells would act as arbiter of the meaning of the life of Catherine Wells in a way paralleled a decade later by Hector Charlesworth with respect to Florence Deeks. The voice of the Canadian woman, quieted in the 1930s, lay embedded in the text of “The Web.” Similarly, that of Catherine Wells rested in the book whose title carried her name. Her voice is a powerful one, yet her husband only hinted at its concerns. He observes the tone of “wistful melancholy” characteristic of her writings. “Desire is there,” he notes, “but it is not active aggressive desire. Frustration haunts this desire.”20
This much is so. But the husband’s words do not convey truth. It rests, instead, in what the man neglects to say. The writings of Catherine Wells overflow with passionate desires, swells of loneliness, deep resentment against unfulfilled longings and the strictures of self-imposed silence, and a self-destructive need to please at any cost. To understand Catherine, her own voice must be heard.
Catherine’s short stories make abundantly clear just how complete her transformation to Jane had been. Several of their titles speak of her desperation: “Fear,” “Cyanide,” “The Draught of Oblivion.” The main subject of these stories is the release found in suicide by desperately lonely women, neglected and at times betrayed. In the final scene of “The Draught of Oblivion,” a woman recognizes that she is destined to remain unhappy because her unfaithful husband “has ever the look of one who seeks.”21 Dorothy Richardson, Rosamund Bland, Amber Reeves, Elizabeth von Arnim, Rebecca West, Margaret Sanger, Moura Budberg, others: each took her toll on Mrs. Wells. Catherine yearned for her own draught of oblivion even as Jane went about her duties.
On and on the lonely and mournful lament of Catherine Wells continues in these stories and poems. It is clear that the rise of Jane within her did little to curb her unmet desires and longings. “In a Walled Garden” comes very close to a stark depiction of the secrets of Easton Glebe. Of all the pieces in The Book of Catherine Wells, this short story is the one that is most patently autobiographical. The story of this home uses the image of drawn curtains, intended to protect those behind the windows from the outside world. The hand that draws the curtain is that of Rosalind Bray, whose maiden name the narrator also provides, as if to suggest an existing identity that must not be forgotten. Her “suburban middle-class background” is akin to that of Amy Catherine Robbins. She has married Edgar Bray, who bears a strong resemblance to H.G. Wells, a man who “drifted into her world by the purest of accident, and profited by its limits.” For this man, Rosalind has surrendered her Christian name, which had been Ellen, so that he could “fasten upon her a name that should better satisfy his ear.”
Blessed by material success, the couple eventually finds a charming house with a “large and very beautiful garden.” It is Easton Glebe by another name. But Rosalind becomes aimless and discontented. Bray comes to bore her. She begins to think that there must be other, more fulfilling ways of life than this.
Then, after an innocent encounter with a handsome young photographer, Rosalind falls truly in love. Everything is changed. Her walled garden is now a prison, her marriage an “absurd blunder.” On this tragic note the story ends.22 Like Rosalind, Catherine is trapped within the garden walls – and by the Jane of her own creation. The deep longing for freedom, fulfillment, and above all for passion and love permeates The Book of Catherine Wells. But so does the need to be dutiful, to serve, to enable.
The few poems in The Book of Catherine Wells speak to the atmosphere of loss behind the curtains kept so carefully drawn closed. In “The Kneeling Image” a wife has somehow sinned and her husband has told her that she is dead to him. She retreats to a life of penance; meanwhile, the hypocritical husband builds a public memorial to a saintly wife. Through the years she weeps each night. And from “Two Love Songs”:
Let us clasp hands again, and play
We’re not apart.
…………
We sit in a quiet room;
You are very far away;
And very strange it is that I
Who so easily could call you
When I would,
Can do so no more.
You are very far away,
Though so near;
I sit alone in our silence,
My dear!23
These were the longings, the silences, and the unmet needs so wilfully diminished as “wistful melancholy” by a widower in mourning. There was, Wells noted, “a lover, never seen, never verified, elusively at the heart of this desire.”24 It seems not to have occurred to him that he was the person whose attention and love his wife Catherine so desperately sought. It is clear that Wells could not see that the short stories and poems he had chosen for inclusion in The Book of Catherine Wells were a powerful indictment of all that he represented as lover and husband.
There is a work that helps explain the peculiar chemistry that existed between this man and this woman. Written two millennia ago, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the great epic poem about time and history, chaos and decay, and the re-establishment of order, contains within it the story of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus we know as the figure from Greek mythology, a young man of great beauty who, loved by all those around him, cannot love them in return. Instead, he reacts with scorn and remains heedless of their heartbreak. Only when he sees his own reflection in a clear pool does he truly love, and from that moment he is trapped.
It is not difficult to see Narcissus in H.G. Wells. Narcissism is above all a disorder of bonding. Everything about Wells speaks to this: the problematic relationship with his parents during his formative years; the incessant preoccupation with himself, to the extent that the image he saw of himself became the central character in most of his novels; the need for a “geographical cure,” moving from one place to another to evade problems. Above all, we see it in his relations with women, which combined attraction and repulsion, love and loathing.25
Like Narcissus, Wells found it possible to connect with people only when he saw aspects of himself reflected in them. And when he found Catherine, and discovered in her a woman willing to transform herself in ways that met his needs, he reacted with deep emotion – the emotion of disgust, and with it withdrawal. He helped create “Jane.” He stayed with her and he said he loved her. But he valued her only because she met his own needs, whatever the cost to the Catherine he wed. There was no genuinely healthy bond in this marriage.
This was a man and an author for whom everyone and everybody existed for the purpose of self-appropriation. He found women useful when they reflected elements of himself, but when they found their own voices he discarded them. And so it was, too, with the words of others.
Appropriation of “The Web” was special only because it reached the courts. In his book H.G. Wells and His Critics, Ingvald Racknem provides a comprehensive discussion of Wells’s many literary plagiarisms. This meticulous scholar demonstrates exhaustively the many ways in which Wells borrowed, directly and indirectly, the words, phrases, and general outlines of a wide range of writers as diverse as Kipling, Sterne, Swift, de Maupassant, Poe, Flammarion, and Gourmont. Racknem finds the evidence so plentiful that he concludes: “Actually, every one of his publications suggests works by various hands; but Wells’s inordinate versatility confused the critics, and it was difficult to ascertain to what extent he was influenced by others, and equally difficult to appreciate his writings.”26
If he could lift material and ideas from published short stories and novels with such impunity, it is doubtful that Wells would have given a second thought to using the unpublished manuscript of an anonymous author. As writer, husband, and lover, H.G. Wells was a vast sponge that absorbed any work or any person that served his purpose.
It is the lesser-known figure of Echo, however, that we must dwell upon if we wish to understand the second wife of H.G. Wells and the appropriation of “The Web.” Ovid’s tale has a specifically contemporary resonance, for it provides a literally classic example of what those in the health profession have come to call “co-dependency.” Short of separation, this was Catherine’s only means of survival in this relationship.
Echo has been forbidden by Hera, wife of Zeus, from initiating conversation. Instead, she is condemned to repeat the words of others. When she falls in love with Narcissus, she is powerless to express her feelings towards him. She can only follow him about in the hope that he will notice her. One day, however, an opportunity arises when Narcissus calls out to his companions, “Is anyone here?” Thrilled, but hidden to him, Echo answers, “Here, here!” He responds: “Come!” and she echoes his word, only to find herself turned away from his outstretched arms. “I will die before I give you power over me,” he declares in disgust. “I will give you power over me,” she responds.27
In this way, we come to sense the existence of a second concealed narrative, one involving the Wellses and “The Web.” In this case, however, the act is less one of conspiracy than it is of collusion, for it involves nothing more than a writer desperate to find a way of gaining an adequate command over the entire course of history and a wife willing to help her husband in any way she can …
Amy Catherine, the vivacious science student of the 1890s, has long since disappeared with the intensity of the marriage; but “Jane” is determined to keep her home intact at any cost. Jane manages the household. It is she, plain Jane, not H.G., who receives the mail and marshals the correspondence and determines which parcels and letters her husband will examine on a given day. It is she of whom a friend of Wells will later write: “What a bulwark of strength she was to him. I have seen her typing and correcting proofs by the hour, all this in addition to running the house so successfully.”28
All sorts of unsolicited packages, from aspiring authors, friends and strangers alike, arrive at Easton Glebe for Wells’s attention. But Wells sees only some of them: Jane is his gatekeeper.29 Towards the end of October or in early November there arrives a manuscript called “The Web.” This one gains her attention, however, for it has come from Richard Gregory at Nature and is accompanied by a most pleasant and helpful note from him. Jane Wells is not quite certain how useful this manuscript will be in her husband’s work, but it certainly looks relevant; besides, it has always been her practice to ensure that H.G. receives anything sent along by his friend.30
In fact, from her perspective, anything that will help in the daunting task of assembling the new book is bound to be a godsend, for if this new history sells as widely as her husband thinks, it offers up the prospect of financial stability at last. Jane, above all others, knows that her husband is the poorest guardian of his own financial interests. Although the success of Mr. Britling Sees It Through in 1916 paid him handsome royalties, he nevertheless has, as one biography will later note, very “heavy outgoings – a house in London and another in the country, a growing family, the … relationship with Rebecca West, a taste for entertaining at home, dining out in good restaurants, and staying in expensive hotels.”31 Besides, he continues to drift further away from her.
The arrival of “The Web” has been providential. The more Jane examines it, the more interested she gets. It is an outline perfect for The Outline. H.G. really must see this. Perhaps her peripatetic husband can finally settle down and make some progress.
Wells is in his study at Easton Glebe, jotting down ideas for the plan of his outline of history. His work is not going well. The modern period is not a problem, for he possesses a good general knowledge of history since the start of the industrial era, and he has firm views on its consequences. The ancient history, however, is difficult. What sources should he use, and in what sequence? Time is pressing. He has decided to devote a year to the project, and several months have already passed with little progress. Encyclopedia volumes and other reference works lie open in front of him, but still there is the problem of finding the pattern, the point of departure. Where to begin? Once this is determined, he is confident that the writing will go well. His muse has never failed him before.
Jane enters the room, carrying a large sheaf of papers, by the looks of it a manuscript. She places the bulky work on his desk, telling him that he should have a look at it: Richard thinks it may be of some real use. And much to H.G.’s surprise, he finds himself staring at a general history of the world – some five hundred pages of it.
He spends the better part of the day getting an overall sense of this work, by “Adul Weaver,” taking some notes on sources the author has used. It is by no means the kind of book he has in mind, not of the grand scale he conceives. But it is more than useful. He even finds the author’s argument amusing, with its single-minded determination to place women in the forefront of history. He has his own thoughts on that subject.
H.G. Wells does not give much thought to the use to which he now puts this manuscript, “The Web,” whose author remains unknown to him. He has always used whatever resources his mind has dredged up – the gist of stories and novels he had long since read, and of plots he could remember. Why should the experience of writing history be different? Many authors before him, he knows, have put past compositions and previously expressed words to good personal use: Laurence Sterne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Reade, any number of editors of dictionaries and encyclopedias.32 What he does is no more, and no less, than simply liberate from the printed page ideas and facts common to humanity and put them forward, in his own inimitable manner, for a new age. Is this not what a prophet must do?
What harm can come from using this neatly typed manuscript history as a general guide, if whole passages are not copied? Do the facts of history not belong to everyone? Judicious use of this “Web” is the means of fleshing out his idea for an outline history of the world. At last, without his having to waste valuable time by reading the sources himself, he can put Jane to good use, typing out notes drawn from “The Web” and searching his library for other sources. Before long, he has a lengthy list of names and topics for her to track down. He also has flagged a number of key pages, so that she might take the manuscript away to her typewriter.
Jane seems especially pleased about this. She has been awfully distracted lately. Now she can be assured that she remains invaluable to him, and he has given her a real sense of direction for the research. Whatever would he do without her? Thus far it has been all hit-and-miss, a frustration for each of them. Now, Jane seems positively keen to forge ahead …
In Toronto, it is mid-January 1919 and Wise and Saul are worried. Two months have passed, and no word from Richard Gregory. Nor has “The Web” been returned, and if they are any judge of Miss Deeks, she is bound to be asking about her manuscript soon. They have known her like before. The dilemma raises shades from their past, for this is not the first time they have been linked to the dubious handling of an author’s work. Nor will it be the last.
Both men well remember the business with Putman, the Ottawa public school superintendent, while Saul was still with Morang. Saul had thought himself quite clever, allowing one Morang book to feed another, so to speak – until Putman found out. By then, Macmillan had purchased Morang and taken over its list, and he and Wise had managed to evade court action only after a thoroughly awkward meeting with Putman and his lawyer. They had bought Putman’s silence, but only by arranging to purchase his rights. The little escapade had cost them $1,500.33 They were lucky that time. And Saul is now wondering whether his luck might soon run out.
Saul has other reasons for concern. Wise does not yet know about the business of the other spinster, Miss Durand. She has been pestering Saul for some time about doing a book for Macmillan, and he has strung her along with vague promises in the hope she would leave him alone. But damned if she has not shown up with a manuscript at just about the same time as Deeks has with “The Web.” The Durand is a children’s book on astronomy, called “Skyland Stars and Stories.” It is not very good, but like the Deeks it contains some interesting stuff that – used properly and by the right author – might just amount to something.
John Saul prides himself on his network of connections to publishers and authors alike, and he knows exactly who might be interested in some of Miss Durand’s material. But Miss Durand returned to his office only the other day, and became indignant – all huff and puff – when he told her that Macmillan is not in a position to publish the book she now claims it “commissioned.”
Saul has another surprise in store for Frank Wise.34 He is about to leave Macmillan for good. The competition at Gage has offered him a position with more responsibility and support staff and a better salary. Besides, there have come to be too many skeletons in the Macmillan closet for Saul’s liking, and several, he knows, are linked to him. First the business with Putman; then the attempt to put the Durand manuscript to good use. Saul knows, too, about Wise’s other office intrigues, and fears that if they are discovered the scandal will draw him in. Finally, there is the business with “The Web.” If he leaves at the end of the month, as Gage wants him to do, he will not be around to face Florence Deeks’s accusations the next time she visits. What can he say if she shows up at the office and insists on immediate possession of her manuscript? She has already written a letter of inquiry this month, and is bound to turn up asking for her precious “Web” any day now. This alone is incentive enough to want to move on, and to place as much distance between himself and Bond Street as possible.
A few weeks later, Saul sits at his desk at Macmillan, putting his affairs in order. He is to leave for Gage the next day, and as one of his final acts as a Macmillan employee, he is writing a letter of some delicacy. The Deeks manuscript has still not returned from England. It has been overseas for almost three months now; had he thought it would take so long to be sent back, he might never have agreed to Wise’s scheme. In fact, he decides, once he begins work with Gage he will quietly put the word out, among those who count, about some of the Macmillan president’s unsavoury ways. If the Deeks woman creates a fuss, it is best that people cast the first glances of accusation in Wise’s direction.
So, carefully, Saul writes his letter to Miss Deeks, worded in a way to allay any worry she may have and to suggest that although he is about to leave Macmillan of Canada her manuscript remains in safe hands on Bond Street.
Almost two months later, near the end of March, Frank Wise receives a package from England. He is relieved to find that it is “The Web,” rather the worse for wear, but intact. After looking at it briefly, he gives it to one of the clerks to place in the vault. Later, when he encounters John Saul’s successor in the hallway, Wise tells him that one of Saul’s manuscripts needs attention. It is called “The Web.” Wise suggests that Liston retrieve it, glance it over, and write its author the letter of rejection that Saul should have drafted before he left. Macmillan’s president is still furious about the departure of his editor, made with so little notice. He feels betrayed.
Then Frank Wise returns to his office. He has just remembered that there is some correspondence related to the Deeks business that he would rather not have others see. He will put it in the spot in his office where he has secreted other highly sensitive papers.
What Frank Wise does not appreciate is that he is not the only person in the office with secrets to keep. May Mercer, his faithful secretary, has kept a mental checklist of all the improprieties she has observed taking place under her employer’s direction. Already she is wondering whether she should report them to Mr. Brett in New York. And if she does, should she write a formal letter or an anonymous note? She is worried and confused, not certain of her course of action. Meanwhile, she will bide her time, and weigh the competing claims of loyalty and conscience …
A middle-aged man, a historian, sits on a lawn chair in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto’s Rosedale district. It is the 19th day of June, 1999, the fortieth anniversary of the day Florence Deeks was buried here. On June 17, 1959, in her ninety-fifth year, she died peacefully in the home she had lived in for half a century. Her moment of release came in the very year the river she so loved was made to flood the land where she was born, in order to form the expanded shipping lanes of the new St. Lawrence Seaway.
The funeral was held at 140 Farnham Avenue. Later, the family gathered at the cemetery – nephews Campbell, Edward, and Douglas, their families, and a few remaining friends. And of course Mabel, the one person among them who had truly known this woman and her story.
It does not take long for the historian to find the Deeks family gravesite, for it is in a prominent section of the cemetery, and a substantial monument and plinth mark the parents’ resting place. Carved oak leaves trim the corners of the large stone. If a person did not search for it, however, one would never find the burial place of Florence Deeks. To do so, it is necessary to kneel down behind the grave of her parents, and look for three half-buried stone markers set in the nearby turf. Hers is the one on the right; the others belong to her sisters.
The historian has scraped away at the crabgrass that threatens to hide the inscription. Time, he knows, has already erased enough. She has been dispossessed of a past in more ways than this. Finally, beneath the crabgrass, some words on stone: “In Loving Memory Of,” followed by her name. No year of birth, not the merest hint at history or accomplishment. It is as if this woman lacked a life of her own and was to be remembered only because she eventually died.
This summer afternoon in 1999 is a fine one. The temperature hovers in the high twenties and the sky is a pale blue. A light breeze rustles the leaves of early summer. Sitting in his chair a few yards from the graves of the three spinster sisters, the visitor is thinking about history and silence and voice.
History and silence and voice. Is this what lies at the heart of the story of Florence Deeks? So much of it rests in voices that can easily evade the telling. And what is the story? The obvious one about a failed lawsuit over plagiarism? Stolen words? Is it a tale of a woman’s struggle to make something of herself? Of her insistence that she have her own voice and make her own statement to the world? Is it about her right to do so, or about the incapacity of those who sat in judgment upon her to weigh evidence that went well beyond their competence or their understanding? Is it fundamentally about justice and injustice?
Or is the heart of the story something else altogether, something deeper? Florence Deeks might well have thought it was really about relations of women and men through the ages, about cooperation and confrontation, complicity and evasion and incomprehension, a narrative that somehow came to be recapitulated in the spinster’s own struggles against patriarchy, whether the benign one within her family or its harsher variant in the publishing and legal professions.
Perhaps it is a story of who gets to write history and proclaim its truths in the public sphere, or about private truths hidden within walls and behind curtains. It may be a story of the depths of loneliness and longing, and of the need to connect.
It is all of this and more. For the historian in the graveyard, the narrative once involved only Florence Deeks, her ill-fated book, and her accusations. But as it has gradually unfolded in his mind over the years, her story has become inexorably linked not only to the famous author whom she glimpsed but once but also to the woman who was his wife.
Florence Deeks and Catherine Wells went to their respective graves each unaware of the life of the other. They lived in vastly different worlds, this impoverished spinster and this wealthy wife. But they held, as if in communion, silences unfathomable to those around them – longings and desires and unfulfilled aspirations common to women through the ages but somehow unique to them alone.
Each woman longed for a voice, desired to be heard. Only in unpublished writings did Catherine’s own voice exist, and after her death, when her words were published, few if any people heard what she had to tell them. Florence found her voice in writing “The Web,” but it too remained an untold story after the book failed to be published.
Graveyards are the final levellers of humanity, in spite of the different sizes of their monuments to the dead. Not far from the plot where Florence Deeks is buried, John Saul and Hector Charlesworth also rest, and the historian takes some time to seek out their resting places.
By the 1930s, John Saul had become a legendary editor within the Canadian publishing industry. Hugh Eayrs came to think of him as a “likeable ruffian – a tough fighter.”35 Eayrs had come to have more than one reason for thinking so, for within months of the return of Florence and Mabel Deeks from London in 1933, his young assistant, John Morgan Gray, found himself seated in a boardroom in the building that housed the offices of the Gage publishing firm, defending his company and the Ryerson Press against an accusation of plagiarism.
Many passages from several American school texts had found their way into a reader, published by Macmillan of Canada and edited under the supervision of Ryerson’s Lorne Pierce, intended for use in Canadian schools. Across the boardroom table from Gray sat John Saul, Gage’s editor-in-chief, and the manager of Nelson in Canada, Sidney Watson – long-time golf partner of Saul and Hugh Eayrs and the one to whom Saul had confided that he had sent the Deeks manuscript to England. Watson, whose firm’s texts had been among those plagiarized, was normally “a stiffly polite man.” But to Gray he appeared at the time “so angry that he had trouble controlling his voice.” Saul had done his homework, and had marked all the offending passages. He “looked like a prosecuting counsel eager to open his case,” Gray later recalled. He had prepared “a stunning indictment.” The men settled the matter amicably, out of court, after Gray suggested a suitable form of compensation for the other firms.36 For his part, Saul might well have thought that the whole business truly was one of life’s more delightful ironies.
One senses that the whiff of scandal that trailed behind Saul over the Deeks affair helped add to the aura that surrounded him. He died in June 1939, at the age of seventy, and was buried near the perimeter of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The handsome engraved stone that marks his resting place has become softened and shaded by the stately tree and the evergreen shrub that frame it.
An elusive figure even in the grave, Frank Wise is not to be found in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. After his release from prison in 1930, he moved to Montreal, where he became a printer of fine watercolour illustrations, a binder of fine books, and a friend to those who appreciated them. In a letter written in 1952 to Lorne Pierce, publisher of the Ryerson Press, he claimed Lawrence Lande, later a distinguished book collector and benefactor of McGill University, as his protegé. Among those with whom Wise corresponded in his later years were the Queen Mother, Lady Churchill (wife of Sir Winston), and Greer Garson. Wise died in Montreal on December 19, 1960, at the age of ninety-one, remembered by his granddaughter in later years as a lovable old grammarian with failing eyesight living out his days in an old folks’ home near Montreal.37
Hugh Eayrs died of a heart attack on April 29, 1940, ten months after John Saul. Death notices remarked, quite appropriately, on the contribution he had made to the cause of Canadian letters – as publisher of Mazo de la Roche, Hector Charlesworth, Morley Callaghan, E.J. Pratt, and Marius Barbeau. The obituaries said that Eayrs had been “essentially a man in whom social instincts were uppermost,” a person with a “driving personality and impulsiveness of action.”38 Those who knew the man could read between these lines, with their discreet reference to a “precarious state of health” that made him “temperamentally unfitted to follow the orders of his physician.” The fact was that Eayrs had long had an affinity for the bottle, and in the end the bottle bested him. He was interred in the Toronto Necropolis, the city’s oldest non-denominational cemetery. At the time of his death he was forty-six years old.
Not far from the graves of John Saul and Florence Deeks in Mount Pleasant Cemetery lies that of Hector Charlesworth, beneath a stone marker set flush with the soil. Many years earlier, Charlesworth had attacked the Group of Seven for their devotion to the “sinister wilderness” and other young artists for their violation of “eternal standards of poetry and beauty.”39 Outspoken to the end, in late December 1945, after listening to a concert given by Duke Ellington at Massey Hall, he penned a newspaper column that dismissed the musician’s jazz as a form of aesthetic corruption. His editors at the Globe and Mail ran it under the headline “Ellington Tests Nerves in Orgy of Cacophony.” Charlesworth family memories have it that the following morning, after reading the review, Ellington telephoned Charlesworth at home and so berated him that it brought on the heart attack that killed him the next day. He was seventy-three.40
Herbert George Wells died less than a year after Hector Charlesworth. The prophet had reached the height of his fame and influence in the spring of 1934, when he had met separately with Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt to determine whether their “two brains” truly worked towards the “socialist world-state” he believed to be “the only hopeful destiny for mankind.”41 During his later years, he continued to pontificate on the idea of an Open Conspiracy and other well-worn Wellsian themes. He discarded Odette Keun and renewed his liaison with Moura Budberg. The estrangement from Rebecca West diminished in rancour until each recalled the other with genuine affection. Margaret Sanger corresponded with Wells on birth control and other matters until almost the end of his life.
Wells’s place within the canon of English literature fell quickly under the modernist weight of Joyce and Eliot and Woolf. His early scientific romances continued to find a wide readership and ensured his place as one of the great founders of “science fiction.” Others would continue to find inspiration in his internationalism. A certain audience existed for his later novels, but in declining numbers, for they lacked the power of imagination of those written earlier. Eventually Wells came to view himself as unappreciated by his public; the reality was probably that his public had come to know him all too well. A continuing stream of royalties from The Outline of History kept him in comfort, even during the blitzkrieg that blackened his mood during the Second World War he had once predicted would never come. His final book, published the year before his death, was called Mind at the End of Its Tether.
Among the visitors to the ailing author at his London flat in the months before he died was Sir Richard Gregory. They talked about the days under Huxley and about Sir Richard’s forthcoming presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, scheduled for July 20, 1946. Sir Richard invited his “oldest and dearest friend” to attend the event, if he felt up to it. When the day arrived, Wells tried his best, but his failing heart kept him bedridden. He died in his sleep on the afternoon of August 13, 1946, five weeks short of his eightieth birthday.
Afterwards, Sir Richard wrote a letter of condolence to Wells’s son George. “When I was with him as a fellow student at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, sixty years ago,” he recalled, “I became his disciple as well as his friend, my attachment to him has always been stronger than to any friend in the world.”42 He spent the next two years attempting to organize a Wells Memorial, but the initiative met with indifferent results.43 Sir Richard passed away in 1952 at his home in Middleton-on-Sea, at the age of eighty-eight.
Florence Amelia Deeks outlived all these men, in most cases by many years, and she took her own version of her fate at the hands of a famous author, several publishers, and British justice to her grave. The history of the world this woman had dared to write remains virtually unknown, as if buried with her. Historical research and feminist scholarship have advanced well beyond the turn-of-the-century insights she had to bear on her subject.
Once, however, her achievement would have constituted a unique and important contribution to feminist history, and perhaps to feminism itself. In 1935, the American historian Mary Ritter Beard, one of the first champions of women’s history, wrote: “What we now have is the instruction of young men and women in the history of men – of men’s minds and manner; in not one college of this country … is there any comprehensive treatment of women’s contributions to civilization and culture.”44 Beard did not know it, but the book she hoped for had been written almost a generation earlier and sat unread in a woman’s home in Toronto. What shape might the writing of women’s history have taken had this feminist outline of history, with its thorough emphasis on patriarchy, inequality, and gender, been published? What revitalizing influence might it have had on feminist historiography during the interwar years, when feminism seemed to be in retreat?
In spite of her setback at the hands of the law and the courts, Florence Deeks knew she had something to say, and at some unknown point between her final defeat at the hands of the Privy Council in 1933 and her death twenty-six years later, she undertook one final sustained exercise in the writing of history. During the eighth or ninth decade of her life, she gathered her resources and sat down to write. She did not repeat the foolishness involved with “The Highway of History,” years before. This time she consulted no man and maintained a steady gaze on the story of her own sex. By the time she had finished, a neatly typed untitled manuscript, half the length of “The Web,” sat on her desk. It was a concise history of women through the ages – history with the men left out. By that stage in her life, publication scarcely mattered. She gained satisfaction enough in having made the statement.
Florence’s dearest friend, her sister Mabel, died in 1962 at the age of eighty-seven, and with her passing the house on Farnham Avenue stood silent. She was buried next to Florence, companion even in death. A year earlier, she had deposited with the Toronto Public Library the many papers of the sister she had so loved, encouraged, and protected. Almost everything among them dwelt on the strange case of Deeks v. Wells. In this way, “The Web” came to be returned to the place where Florence had given it birth. Her history of women rests there, too – another burial, unpublished, unread, and all but unknown and forgotten. Like “The Web” and its feisty author, it remains one of history’s many silences. What counts is its very existence, for it tells us that Florence Deeks, like Catherine Wells, had rediscovered her own true voice and had found words once more to speak her mind.