The New Machiavelli
Wells wrote a scandal into a novel: a politician who wrecks everything for a love affair, and the English public life that made both possible. Publishers refused it.
Wells’s 1911 novel about a politician who wrecks his career for a love affair, largely autobiographical, scandalous on publication, and sharper about the machinery of English public life than anything else he wrote. Several publishers refused it outright. The politics are the real subject: committee work, party discipline, and the slow discovery that reform requires the very machine it is meant to replace.
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Maria Popova
H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946) explores the price and the reward of this blessing discomposure in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (public domain) — a story largely autobiographical, for which Wells paid a high price, but which he must have felt would offer a compass through the confusions of a complex yet mutely common human experience.
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