Apropos of Dolores

Abstract

In a series of articles in Time and Tide (October 1934) which appeared under the title ‘H. G. Wells—The Player’, Odette Keun—who had been Wells’s close friend and companion for the previous decade—strongly criticised him for his alleged inconsistency and disingenuousness and asserted that Experiment in Autobiography, which was then being published, was ‘an enormous reel of self-justification’. For ten years Wells and Madame Keun had enjoyed a friendship from which both no doubt gained much—his warm appreciation of her may be seen in the dedica-tions of both The World of William Clissold and The Bulpington of Blup—but by 1934 the relationship had considerably deteriorated. Instead of replying to the Time and Tide articles Wells bided his time and, four years later, expressed his mature reflections on the Madame Keun affair in a bitingly amusing novel in which she is caricatured as Dolores Wilbeck.⁵³ This is not to say that Dolores is simply a fictional portrait of Odette Keun—the reality is more subtle than that—but rather that Wells drew on many of her distinctive characteristics and mannerisms in sketching this wryly malicious vignette.