morrisvan wrote:
The reason why I'm asking is that an abridged talking books version of WoTW released in 1977 with Robert Hardy reading had a downbeat ending where the wife is killed.
That's interesting, I hadn't heard of that version.
However, both the original Pearson's serialisation and (of course, as you well know!) the novel have her turn up at the end.
I suspect that that was Wells's concession to convention, having her survive. After all, he'd made his point by trashing London and the Home Counties, killing Lord knows how many people, so perhaps he just felt that it would have been too grim to have her die as well.
As for what happened to her within the plot, who can say? Presumably, she and her cousin either left Leatherhead before its destruction - they would have had time (the Narrator says he was told that Leatherhead was wiped out two days after he was trapped with the Curate in the ruined house, which means Leatherhead was destroyed three days after the wife arrived there); or they simply survived it directly - after all, we only have the testimony of the couple who told the Narrator that everyone in Leatherhead was killed; they may simply have been wrong (and why not? South East England was still in chaos, communications would have been fractured and incomplete).
In any case, by making it seem as if she had been killed, Wells added yet another, albeit minor, element of tension to the story.