Shadow Lovers

Nearing age 70, and in what would be the last decade of his life, H. G. Wells fell in love at least three times--once with the much younger Baroness Moura Budberg, and soon thereafter with two well-born Americans, Constance Coolidge and Martha Gellhorn, twenty-five and forty years his junior, respectively. These would constitute what Wells himself described as his "last flounderings towards the wife idea" and demonstrate in many ways that Wells was driven less by his considerable intelligence than by his obsession to find his ideal lover - what he called his "lover-shadow." In Shadow Lovers, Andrea Lynn has created a fascinating study of the very personal side of one of this century's greatest thinkers. This self-proclaimed Don Juan was said to have "radiated" energy: intellectual, emotional, physical, and sexual. Drawing on papers recently made public by the Wells estate, Lynn documents Wells' relationship with each of these femmes fatales . She also paints a vivid portrait of the early part of this century in the United States, Paris, and London. Shadow Lovers is the winner of the 2001 Society of Midland Authors Book Award for Biography.