In June 1889, Mrs Humphry Ward’s open letter ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’ was published with over a hundred other female signatories against the extension of Parliamentary suffrage to women. Inflamed by this ‘most despicable piece of treachery ever perpetrated towards women by women’, Corbett wrote and published New Amazonia.In her novel, Corbett envisions a successful suffragette movement eventually giving rise to a breed of highly evolved ‘Amazonians’ who turn Ireland into a utopian society. The book’s female narrator wakes up in the year 2472, much like Julian West awakens in the year 2000 in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Corbett’s heroine, however, is accompanied by a man of her own time, who has similarly awakened from a hashish dream to find himself in New Amazonia.The narrator reacts very positively to what she sees and learns; but her male companion reacts precisely oppositely and adjusts badly. Read on to know more!
Excerpt:
‘The next event I can chronicle was opening my eyes on a scene at once so beautiful and strange that I started to my feet in amaze. This was not my study, and I beheld nothing of the magazine which was the last thing I remembered seeing before I went to sleep. … I was recalled to the necessity of behaving more decorously by hearing someone near me exclaim in mystified accents, ‘By Jove! But isn’t this extraordinary? I say, do you live here, or have you been taking hasheesh too?’…
Circa l’autore
Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846–1930), also known as Mrs George Corbett, was an English feminist writer. She worked as a journalist for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle and as a popular writer of adventure and society novels. Many of her novels originated as magazine serials and not published in book form.Her writing was not universally well received, but Hearth and Home listed her along with Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the masters of the art of the detective novel.
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