Source: “Reputations revisited,” Times
Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977
The first issue of the
TLS appeared on January 17, 1902. To mark our 75th anniversary we asked a number
of writers, scholars and artists to nominate the most underrated and overrated
books (or authors) of the past seventy-five years. This feature is remembered
now for two reasons: first, the revival of the reputation and works of the
English novelist Barbara Pym; second, for Vladimir Nabokov’s odd choice of H. G.
Wells’ lesser novel, The Passionate Friends, which one Wells
biographer described as, “by anybody’s standards … a solemn and boring
book.”
The responses are presented in the order of the original
article. I have omitted the “overrated” responses.
Vladimir Nabokov:
The Passionate
Friends by H. G. Wells
is my most prized example of the unjustly ignored masterpiece. I must have been
fourteen or fifteen when I went through its author’s fiction after some five
winters of tacit access to my father’s library. Today at seventy-seven I clearly
remember how affected I was by the style, the charm, the cream of the book,
while not bothering about its “message” or “symbols” if any. (I have never
reread it and now I see it as a coloured haze leaving only some final details —
growing a little closer to me in time — still coming
through.)