West's relationship with her son, Anthony West, was not a happy one. The rancor between them came to a head when Anthony, himself a gifted Writer, his father's biographer (H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life [1984]), and a Novelist, published Heritage (1955), a fictionalized autobiography. West never forgave her son for depicting in Heritage the relationship between an illegitimate son and his two world-famous, unmarried parents, and for portraying the mother in unflattering terms. Essentially, she felt Anthony was airing in public his accusations against her as a bad mother, which stemmed partly from the fact that she had made a fiction of his provenance. She had asked him to call her Auntie, and his father Wellsie, until he was about four or five. He also felt she had made a habit of leaving him in institutions in his early years while she developed her career in the United States. West countered by claiming that she spent as much time with him as any child could reasonably hope to spend with a mother who was a professional. She was exasperated at his focus on her parenting, when he did not accuse his father of abandonment, even though Wells had been even more absent during Anthony's youth. Anthony, in fact, idolized Wells. The depiction of West's alter ego in Heritage as a deceitful, unloving Actress (West had trained as an Actress in her youth) and poor caregiver so wounded West that she broke off relations with her son and threatened to sue any publisher who would bring out Heritage in England. She successfully suppressed an English edition of the novel, which was only published there after her death, in 1984. Although there were temporary rapprochements between her and Anthony, a state of alienation persisted between them, causing West grief until her dying hour. She fretted about her son's absence from her deathbed, but when asked whether he should be sent for, answered: "perhaps not, if he hates me so much".