The Open Heart: Uplifting Stories & Poetry By Catherine Wells 28/04/2025

Book Review – Beyond and Within: and The Book of Catherine Wells

Latest on the crusade of Flame Tree’s ‘Beyond & Within’ to shine a light on under-appreciated voices comes a reprint of ‘The Book of Catherine Wells’ supplemented with her unfinished novella, ‘The Open Heart’. Overshadowed by the success of her husband, her work didn’t really see the light of day until after her death when H. G. Wells published a collection of her best with his own introduction to them.

Although she wrote towards the later end of the Gothic period of literature, her prose and poems swing the other way, seemingly embracing a kind of longing and ennui as her vehicle into fantasy and horror – it reminded me of early Frank L. Baum in that sense.

If you are reading this review on Horror Frights, please note the review has been stolen from us

‘The Draught of Oblivion’, concerning a plight to find a love potion turning sour and depressing, stood out to me as one of the better tales, as did ‘The Ghost’, a straightforward tale with a straightforward twist, but told to the best of its ability with an effective sense of moodiness and wistfulness. She does dabble with humour, but stylistically if there’s a character’s emotional journey to follow she’ll go far further down that path than any other, and on occasion, as the intro frequently intimates, you’ll wonder whether you’re reading an autobiography.

To that end, her writing is a different beast from that of her husband; in fact the idea of needing a safe space away from either life or a husband is an overriding theme of the stories. ‘The Beautiful House’ demonstrates this at its perhaps most poignant, a tale with all the glaze of a Brontë romance yet the haunting misery of a Robert Louis Stevenson. There’s the adage that fewer adverbs makes for a better story, however Wells’ prose in especially her more pessimistic writings prove how neat and cogent such a story can be. Intentional or otherwise, these stories read like a stream of consciousness and so bring a rawness and intelligence in their wake.

The primary thrust of this addition however is her (incomplete) novella itself, ‘The Open Heart’, a story which across its four chapters tells a kind of diluted ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ (by Michael Morpurgo), where a woman is marooned on a desert island and finds its paradise to soon be anything but. Perhaps the key to reading Wells here is to be introspective, as how much you buy into the terrors and tribulations of solitude is key exposing this story rather than viewing it as if through a trapdoor.

I’m not entirely sure how much the story delivers given it is incomplete, yet from what we have there’s before all else evidence of something yearning and there’s a kind of un-Panglossian atmosphere which I can only imagine William Golding also had in mind when he wrote ‘Lord of the Flies’. At any rate, ‘The Open Heart’ feels like the perfect title for the incomplete novella, because you do frequently feel as if you can see the very workings of Catherine Wells’ emotions.

Ultimately, ‘The Open Heart’ is I’d say the most academic attempt in the ‘Beyond & Within’ range, and that might put some people off, however if you can push through that there’s something enjoyable and poignant to be found, and not just for scholars of late-19th century writers. Whether it’s scandal, humour, repression, or yearning, Catherine Wells’ writing offers new angles on established ideas; and so while ‘The Open Heart’ itself is the only “new” addition, since all of Wells’ prose/poems here have been published before, it’s worth a gander, and especially if you’ve never experienced her writing before, this is where to go!

The Open Heart: Stories & Poetry of Catherine Wells (Beyond and Within)

Catherine Wells (1872–1927) was the wife of H.G. Wells and the author of short stories, poems and an unfinished novella, The Open Heart, a haunting study of a woman’s sense of unfulfilment that adds significantly to our knowledge of early 20th-century feminism. Published here for the first time, The Open Heart is brought together with her stories and poems that appeared in The Book of Catherine Wells (1928).

The Open Heart tells of a woman’s shipwreck on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean, a kind of earthly paradise in which she finds herself entirely alone. Included, too, in this collection are Catherine Wells’ highly accomplished tales of forbidden love, of a woman’s subjection to a dominant and possessive husband and of female despair. These stories illustrate what H.G. Wells called ‘her brooding tenderness’, her ‘sense of invincible fatality’ and her ‘predisposition towards a haunting, dreamland fantasy of fear’.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative.

Purchase a copy here

Author

Benjamin Kurt Unsworth
Currently studying Latin, Ancient Greek, and Ancient Classical History at Newcastle University (because his obsessive love of Doctor Who and horror films wasn’t nerdy enough), Ben writes short stories and reviews for various outlets, drinks copious cups of tea, loves knitting, and buys far too many waistcoats and velvet jackets.
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