Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc are the two writers most closely associated with Sussex and both wrote extensively about the county they loved.

But other authors were also influenced by their time in Sussex, and few more so than HG Wells.

He even stipulated that his ashes should be scattered in the sea off the south coast when he died in 1946.

His mother, Sarah, was a Sussex woman who lived at Chichester and Midhurst. She became a ladies’ maid at Uppark, the great country house on the Downs where she worked for Miss Frances Bullock. While there she was attracted to Joseph Wells, a gardener who had been a county cricketer for Kent.

Sarah left Uppark to look after her ailing parents but they both died swiftly and before she could decide anything else, Joseph Wells proposed marriage.

She accepted and they had four children, including Herbert George in 1866.

They also ran a china shop in Bromley, Kent, but it was not a success.

In 1880, Frances Bullock offered Sarah a job at Uppark as a housekeeper and she returned there. HG, now 14, was allowed to stay with her and was given the run of the library. A voracious reader, many of the books he pored over there influenced his future life.

In 1881 he went to work for a chemist at Midhurst and learned Latin in the evenings, thanks to local grammar school headteacher Horace Byatt.

Sarah Wells could not afford the fees but Byatt was so impressed with the young man he offered to have him boarding at the school.

Despite this, Sarah thought her son would fare better in trade and sent him to a drapers in Southsea. Wells spent a miserable two years there, but they provided rich material for his later novels Returning to Midhurst, Wells took a job at the school as an assistant master while continuing to study. But rather than return to Uppark, he rented lodgings over a sweet shop next door to the Angel pub.

He studied so hard that his exam results were outstanding and he was offered a free place at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington.

Wells later said he arrived in Midhurst as a happy but desperate fugitive from servitude and left it in glory.

He placed Uppark in his novel Tono-Bungay as Bladesover, a big house which he located on the Kentish Downs, although he denied the housekeeper was based on his mother.

Wells also set much of the Invisible Man in the village of Iping near Midhurst, while a lesser-known novel, the Wheels Of Chance, describes a cycling holiday where the riders visit Midhurst, Cocking, Lavant, Chichester and Bognor.

The author was keen on cycling as a young man and conveys in this book the excitement of bikes when they had just become popular in the 1890s.

With his novels and scientific works, Wells became a writer of international significance. He dabbled in left-wing politics and became notorious as a womaniser.

Although based in London until his death, Wells never forgot his roots and said: “I know no country to compare with West Sussex except the Cotswolds.”

* Uppark is owned by the National Trust and is open to visitors. More about Wells and other writers can be found in Sussex In Fiction by Richard Knowles (Country Books, £18)