Description

A fantasy from an early feminist writer who dared explore a world without men.

A lost-world fantasy in the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Utopianism of William Morris, Herland inverted expectations with its exclusively female society visited by three men from the Edwardian era. An early example of feminist science fiction, this utopian fantasy explores miracle births, role reversals and concepts of peace and freedom.

Flame Tree 451 presents a new series, The Foundations of Feminist Fiction. The early 1900s saw a quiet revolution in literature previously dominated by male adventure heroes. Both men and women moved beyond the norms of the male gaze to write from a different gender perspective, sometimes with female protagonists, but also expressing the universal freedom to write on any subject whatsoever. Each book features a brand new biography and a glossary of literary terms.

About the author(s)

Celebrated feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She is perhaps best remembered as the author of the short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, which details a woman’s descent into madness after she is cooped up in a misguided attempt to restore her to health. The story was a clear indicator of Gilman’s views on the restraints of women and related to her own treatment for postpartum depression.

Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Oxford Brookes University and specializes in the areas of modernist and avant-garde studies, women’s writing, technology and literature, and science fiction and futurisms. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019), and co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022).

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