Catherine Wells

Amy Catherine Robbins was born in Islington, London, on 8 July 1872, the daughter of Frederick and Maria Catherine Robbins.

She was described as "fragile figure, with very delicate features, very fair hair, and very brown eyes".{{Cite book |last=Abrams |first=Dennis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BABcAgAAQBAJ&dq=Amy+Catherine+Robbins&pg=PT47 |title=H. G. Wells |publisher=Infobase Learning |isbn=978-1-4381-4921-9 |publication-date=2013 |language=en}} Following the death of her father, she undertook degree study in order to become a teacher.{{Cite book |last=Wells |first=H.G. |url=http://archive.org/details/bookofcatherinew0000hgwe |title=The Book of Catherine Wells |date=1928 |publisher=Doubleday, Doran and Company |others=Internet Archive |location=Garden City, N.Y.}} She was a student of H. G. Wells at the Tutorial College in Holborn, and they married on 27 October 1895. They lived initially in Camden Town and Sevenoaks, and later at Woking and Worcester Park in Surrey. Their household in Worcester Park was portrayed by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915). Richardson had been a schoolfriend of Catherine Wells.{{Cite journal |last=Glikin |first=Gloria |date=December 1963 |title=Dorothy M. Richardson: The Personal 'Pilgrimage' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/460735 |journal=PMLA |volume=78 |issue=5 |pages=586–600 |doi=10.2307/460735 |jstor=460735 |issn=0030-8129|url-access=subscription }} The couple were known to their friends as H. G. and Jane.

File:Spade House (1).jpg, home of the Wells family from 1900]]

In 1900, they moved to Spade House, a home built for them and designed by architect C. F. A. Voysey.{{Cite book |last=Wagar |first=W. Warren |author-link=W. Warren Wagar

|title=H.G. Wells: Traversing Time |date=2004 |publisher=Wesleyan University Press |isbn=978-0-8195-6725-3 |series=The Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction series |location=Middletown (Conn.)}} They had two sons: George Philip (born 1901) and Frank Richard (born 1903).{{Cite web |title=Amy Catherine Wells {{!}} Orlando |url=https://orlando.cambridge.org/people/04d0e076-e16f-44ec-a2d0-c875d5c1b349 |access-date=2024-06-28 |website=orlando.cambridge.org}}{{Cite news |date=20 December 1982 |title=Mr Frank Wells |newspaper=The Times |pages=12}} The Times described Catherine Wells as "her husband's devoted friend and assistant", and "one of the very few transcribers who could read the odd mixture of longhand and shorthand in which he wrote his books", adding that she showed a business acumen which supported her husband.{{Cite news |date=8 October 1927 |title=Mrs. H. G. Wells. |work=The Times |pages=6}} Her own literary output, they wrote, "was necessarily restricted by her domestic responsibilities".

During her lifetime, Catherine Wells had a small number of writings published.{{Cite news |date=1 February 1911 |title=The English Review |work=Globe |pages=5}}{{Cite news |date=23 March 1928 |title=Late Mrs H.G. Wells |work=Aberdeen Press and Journal |pages=5}} Reviewing her stories (published posthumously in The Book of Catherine Wells), Katherine Anne Porter wrote that Catherine Wells' writing was partly a reaction against her identity being subsumed to domestic life and overshadowed by H. G. Wells.{{Cite journal |last=Flanders |first=Jane |date=Summer 1979 |title=Katherine Anne Porter's Feminist Criticism: Book Reviews from the 1920's |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346540 |journal=Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies |volume=4 |issue=2 |pages=44–48 |doi=10.2307/3346540 |jstor=3346540 |issn=0160-9009|url-access=subscription }} Porter argued that:

this indefatigable woman asked for one thing more. She asked for one fragment of her mind to use as she liked. She resolutely set herself to write... [and] the stories offer a strange contrast to the portrait her husband gives.

a sense of the short story as a medium for revealing life rather than for surprising the reader... There is so much insight, so much observation, so much courage, so much compassion in them. Their writer was too good an artist to succeed as a magazine writer, perhaps too good a magazine writer to please herself as an artist.{{Cite news |last=Lynd |first=Sylvia |date=24 April 1928 |title=Mrs H.G. Wells: Her Greatest Quality |work=Daily News |location=London |pages=4}}

Catherine Wells died from cancer on 6 October 1927.{{Cite news |date=10 October 1927 |title=Deaths |newspaper=The Times |pages=1}} Her funeral at Golders Green Crematorium was led by T. E. Page, using a service written by H. G. Wells.{{Cite book |last=Wells |first=Catherine |url=http://archive.org/details/bookofcatherinew0000hgwe |title=The Book of Catherine Wells with an introduction by her husband H.G. Wells |publisher=Doubleday, Doran and Company |year=1928 |location=Garden City, N.Y.}}{{Cite news |date=11 October 1927 |title=H.G. Wells' Sorrow |work=Northern Whig |pages=6}} He had based this on the secular ceremony script created by humanist and educationist F. J. Gould.{{Cite web |title=Humanist Heritage: Humanist Ceremonies |url=https://heritage.humanists.uk/humanist-ceremonies/ |access-date=2024-07-01 |website=Humanist Heritage |language=en}} Attendees included George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett.{{Cite news |date=11 October 1927 |title=Mr. H.G. Wells' Tribute |newspaper=Daily Mirror |pages=2}} In an obituary in The Times, Catherine Wells was described as having been "an admirable hostess... [with] a pretty sense of humour":

Nor was her benevolence confined to her home, which she made an abiding centre of harmony and good-will. For she was always ready to help any lame dog over a stile in the most tactful and unobtrusive manner.

In the 1979 film Time After Time, the actress Mary Steenburgen plays Amy Robbins, a San Francisco woman, who befriends and later falls in love with the fictional H. G. Wells, who has traveled to the future. Robbins in the story travels back in time with Wells. A postscript implies that she is his historical wife.

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• The Book of Catherine Wells at the Internet Archive

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Category:1872 births

Category:1927 deaths

Category:20th-century English poets

Category:20th-century English women writers

Category:Deaths from cancer in England

Category:People from Islington (district)

Category:Poets from London

Category:Writers from the London Borough of Islington