The secret love life of H.G. Wells, the titan of the early 20th-century literary world who was courted by politicians and statesmen throughout the world, was more complicated and controversial than the world has dared imagine.
Thanks to a six-year investigation and the discovery of a treasure trove of previously suppressed material, a new book about to be published in the United States will prove that the writer's greatest love was a spy who relayed information revealed by his friends back to Russia with his knowledge. It will also reveal the identities of two previously unknown lovers, one of whom strenuously denied the love affair until the end of her life.
In Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H.G. Wells , author Andrea Lynn reveals how Moura Budberg, the Russian baroness who captured Wells's heart in the early 1930s, pretended to be in love with Wells to gain unfettered access to his wide and politically elevated circle of friends.
Lynn also suggests that it was Budberg's influence that led to the meeting between Stalin and Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb in 1934, after which the British visitors publicly praised the dictator and the Communist philosophy.
'Moura may also have been involved in counter-espionage,' said Lynn. 'It's impossible to tell exactly what was going on, because all her papers and files were destroyed in a convenient house fire, but from Wells's suppressed letters it's clear that something was happening and that, although he knew about it, his love for her made him powerless to leave or expose her.'
The bouncy little man whose tiny hands and squeaky voice belied his success as the Don Juan of the intelligentsia, was loved by legions of beautiful women throughout his life, one of whom credited his phenomenal pulling power to the fact that his body smelt irresistably of honey.
In an attempt to come clean about his amoratory experiences, Wells started work on his second autobiography, H.G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography, in 1934, immediately after the publication of his Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) .
While his first autobiography steered clear of Wells's lively sex life, he used the second manuscript to explore his sexual adventures in detail.
'I have done what I pleased, so that every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself,' he admitted in the book. 'This is my intimate diary and the story of my amatory life.'
In accordance with his wishes that the exposé would remain unpublished until after both his death and the deaths of the women concerned, Wells's eldest son and chief editor, George Wells, held the manuscript back until 1984, 38 years after Wells's death and a year after the death of Rebecca West, the mother of Wells's illegitimate son, Anthony West.
Before the manuscript was finally published, George Wells excised large chunks of the text, including the names and details of two of Wells's last lovers, and his suspicions about Budberg's activities.
'H.G. had been extremely candid [in his second autobiography], though not X-rated,' said Lynn. 'The heirs, however, played it cautiously, their actions prompted by courtesy and concern over litigation. As well as removing pages and excising entire stories, the heirs also held back a huge cache of letters of a personal nature that H.G. received over the decades from the many women in his life '
In 1994 the Wells family sold the unexpurgated manuscript and more than 500 letters to the H.G. Wells Collection at the University of Illinois Library, but although Lynn - at the time a journalist attached to the university - publicised the sale, no Wellsian scholar came forward to investigate the contents of the collection.
'I couldn't believe that no one seemed interested,' she said. 'Then I suddenly remembered that I was a writer and researcher in my own right.
'What I have discovered blew me away. For six years I have managed to keep the things I have discovered secret. The effort was phenomenal: what I have uncovered will scandalise the literary world and change the face of Wellsian scholarship.'
Wells was 68 and married to Jane, his second wife, when he met Moura Budberg. 'I think I have really loved only three women steadfastly,' he wrote in the Postscript . 'My first wife, my second wife and Moura Budberg.'
But in letters to his close friend, Christabel McLaren, which have been suppressed for almost 70 years, Wells referred to 'the faint aroma of espionage of Moura's world in Berlin and Paris and Knightsbridge'.
'I'm tired, I'm bored by a Moura who...rambles round corners & for all I know is a spy. I'm not going to be trailed,' he complained, referring to the interest the French government had developed in Moura's activities.
'She flits away to her old familiar gossips at 88 Knightsbridge, and to Berlin and Paris and Warsaw - and maybe even Moscow,' he added.
Two years after the death of Wells's second wife in 1927, Budberg came to England and she and Wells resumed their affair. Although she refused to marry him - proving, according to her friends still alive today, that she was no spy - Lynn maintains that she refused to marry Wells because she was already in love with the British agent in Moscow, Bruce Lockhart.
'Although marriage to him would have given her the perfect protection, her relationship with Wells was work,' she said.
According to further passages removed from Wells's original draft of his Postscript, his affair with Budberg was still in full fettle when he began his affair with Constance Coolidge and, less than a year later, with the 26-year-old Martha Gellhorn, 'relationships which have been totally unknown except to a few members of the family'.
Wells met the American-born Coolidge, a French countess, in the South of France towards the end of 1934. Three of the nine pages Wells devoted to Coolidge in his Postscript were cut by his son, leaving no reference to her parents, husbands or lovers.
Coolidge, who died in 1973, was devoted to Wells; alone among his lovers, Lynn believes, she offered him a disinterested and sincere affection. But the discovery that will scandalise the literary world is that when Martha Ellis Gellhorn and the 68-year-old Wells met over a meal at the Roosevelts' residence in 1935, they began a passionate affair that could have ended in marriage.
Throughout her life, Gellhorn steadfastly denied rumours of an affair. 'I was probably the last journalist to speak to Martha before her death in 1998, and she told me again and again that there was nothing but friendship between them,' said Lynn.
In pages suppressed from the Postscript, Wells is adamant that he and Gellhorn - who later married Ernest Hemingway not only became lovers but discussed marriage. 'We had a very happy time together, making love, talking and reading,' he wrote in one suppressed passage.
'I was quite definitely in love with her at the time and she with me. We discussed our future relationship but felt the manifest incompatibility of our ages.'
The truth and extent of Budberg's espionage activities will probably never be known, but Gellhorn's letters to Wells - the missing piece of the jigsaw - were deposited at Boston University after her death. They will remain sealed until 2023, 25 years after her death.
'Until that day, we won't know for certain what the truth of their story is,' said Lynn. 'Investigating this has been like peeling back the layers of an onion: I could have gone on forever, but I had to stop somewhere.'
Useful links
www.rdg.ac.uk The H.G. Wells Society
www.kirjasto.sci.fi Biography and bibliography
