H.G. Wells certainly had done some critical thinking and was not lacking an opinion of the novel. He once wrote in a letter to Joyce, "Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies...?"
Given the bluntness of that letter, you might think there were only ill feelings between the two, but H.G. Wells had no desire to see bitterness develop between himself and Joyce. He actually held Joyce in high esteem, and his words even struck a much friendlier tone in closing the letter. He wrote, "My warmest wishes to you Joyce. I can't follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong."
Clearly, H.G. Wells was not a fan of this particular work. However, he did not let it damage the respect that he had for Joyce's "genius," which he also wrote in that letter.
