Mizora: A Prophecy
A Prophecy
Mary E. Bradley Lane 1890
This novel follows a Russian exile who discovers a hidden country beneath the Arctic. Its women-only society produces food through chemistry and raises children without fathers.
191 pages 3h 42m reading time
- One of the earliest feminist utopias (stories about an ideal society) written by an American woman.
- Argues that the key to women's freedom is education, and imagines a nation where learning and science have replaced war, crime, and disease.
- Pictures a perfect society that has quietly removed people with darker skin, which makes it an important early example of how dreams of progress could carry racist ideas.
- Often studied as a forerunner of later women's utopias, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland."
Published without her name
It first appeared with no author's name, and readers knew little about who wrote it for many years.
First printed in a newspaper
It came out in weekly parts in the Cincinnati Commercial, an Ohio newspaper, before appearing as a book.
Drew on hollow Earth ideas
Its hidden land echoes a popular idea, pushed by Ohio's John Cleves Symmes, that the Earth is hollow.
Rediscovered a century later
Long forgotten, it returned to print in the 1970s as scholars searched for lost writing by women.