About the book (from Wikipedia):
Love and Mr Lewisham is an 1899 novel set in the 1880s by H. G. Wells. It was among his first outside the science fiction genre. Wells took considerable pains over the manuscript and said of it that “the writing was an altogether more serious undertaking than I have ever done before.” He later included it in a 1933 anthology entitled Stories of Men and Women in Love.
About H. G. Wells (from Wikipedia):
Herbert George “H.G.” Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, and social commentary, and even textbooks and rules for war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels, and Wells is sometimes called the father of science fiction, though the same claim is made for Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Wells’s earliest specialized training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle class life, led to the suggestion, when they were published, that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.