Meanwhile (The Picture of a Lady)

New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927. First American Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Good. 0x0x0. First American edition. Jacket spine stained, jacket rubbed with chips and tears. Top page ridge lightly soiled. 1927 Hard Cover. 320 pp. Meanwhile is a 1927 novel by H. G. Wells set in an Italian villa early in 1926. Meanwhile is divided into two books: "The Utopographer in the Garden" and "Advent". In the first book, Cynthia and Philip Rylands, a wealthy British couple, are entertaining guests at Casa Terragena, an Italian villa with a famous garden on the Italian Riviera. Among the party are a prominent author, "the great Mr. Sempack," an American aesthete, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, the beautiful, vivacious Lady Catherine, Col. and Mrs. Bullace, Lady Grieswold, and a number of others. At dinner, Sempack, a brilliant talker with ideas similar to Wells's, expounds the idea that a "Great Age" is certain to come, and that contemporaries are obliged in the present to live, as it were, "meanwhile": "Since nothing was in order, nothing was completely right. We lived provisionally. There was no just measure of economic worth; we had to live unjustly .... We were justified in taking life as we found it; in return if we had ease and freedom we ought to do all that we could to increase knowledge and bring the great days of a common world-order nearer, a universal justice, the real civilisation, the consummating life, the days that would justify the Martyrdom of Man." The novel's second "book" is dominated by Philip Rylands's letters describing the British political situation ("many of the leading participants in the strike appear in the novel without disguise") and his recruitment to the Open Conspiracy, Wells's plan for establishing a World Republic. But it is also punctuated with a number of subplots, some comic, some dramatic. Lady Catherine undertakes the seduction of an unwilling Mr. Sempack, but before this affair can be consummated, she flees to join a British fascist committed to fighting the class war back at home. Mrs. McManus, a nurse from Ulster who comes to assist Mrs. Rylands in the last stages of her pregnancy, is a memorable comic character. And Mrs. Rylands, with the help of Mrs. McManus, comes heroically to the aid of Signor Vinciguerra, a liberal Italian leader being hunted by Italian fascists in her garden; she succeeds in helping him escape to France. Meanwhile concludes with the return of a now devoted, engagé Philip to Cynthia after she has given birth to their son.