Publisher's Synopsis
These essays treat common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds. The range of subjects reaches from Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century Blazing World of the North Pole, to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery; and from the 18th- and 19th-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, to science fiction pulps; finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy and Mitchison.;This collection aims to show that these fictions relate to one another historically, and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a "better place".
