In the chapter of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934) called "Fairly Launched at Last," H. G. Wells looks back at the influence upon him at the beginning of his literary career. He recalls in particular that once much reviled and now rather too much forgotten writer, Grant Allen and notes that he had never made a fair acknowledgment of a certain mental indebtedness to Allen. Grant Allen, the older by eighteen years, had had, in Wells' own words, an earlier infection of that same ferment of biology and socialism that was working in my blood and had been as disturbed by social injustice and sexual limitation as Wells himself was to be. Yet fair acknowledgment still eludes Grant Allen, who, if he is not completely forgotten today, is exhumed usually to be reviled afresh. Motivated by misreadings of The Woman Who Did (1895), the feminist novel responsible for Allen's notoriety in the 1890s (and which Wells himself reviewed scathingly), such modern exhumations are usually undertaken by those who probably would have been not only charmed by the man himself, but also in agreement with his ideas.
