Frances,
Thanks for your correction. You ask whether VN really
thought The Invisible Man to be one of the greatest novels in English
literature. I think he did. He was a great admirer of Wells' novels and
listed as many as five of them among his favorite books: The Time
Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War of the Worlds and
The First Men on the Moon (Strong Opinions, p. 175). In LATH there
are allusions to Passionate Friends and The Island of Dr Moreau. What VN
thought of Wells' Russia in The Shadows* (in which the author famously calls
Lenin "The Dreamer in the Kremlin"), written after HGW's visit to Petrograd and
Moscow of the War Communism years, is a different question. Btw., here
you can read an article by Martin Gardner on Wells' book: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/h-g-wells-in-russia/.
*Do the Shadows in Pale Fire have anything to do with
the title of Wells' book, I wonder?