Edinburgh Napier University

  The focus of this paper is H. G. Wells’s brief friendship with Joseph Conrad in the closing years of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was a friendship that would end in resentment, estrangement, and much disagreement over the future role and form of the novel. However, during the brief period of their close proximity in Kent, Conrad and Wells had intimate discussions about the form and purpose of the English novel, discussions that were also informed by Ford Madox Ford’s presence and his close working relationship with Conrad. Wells’s involvement with Conrad reveals the intellectual and artistic struggles that took place as literary modernism was emerging. This paper outlines some of the debates that occurred and how the artistic direction of both writers became crystallized during their discussions.