Abstract

This new edition of Mizora about an 1880s radical feminist utopia includes a new, extensive introduction—a groundbreaking scholarly treatment of the work—that provides a critical apparatus to appropriately place Mizora and author Mary E. Bradley Lane in the cultural and historical context of the nineteenth century. A precursor to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Mizora is the first all female utopian novel in American literature. The novel follows its heroine Vera Zarovitch, a stalwart, husky woman from the Russian nobility who, after exile to Siberia, withstands the rigors of the Arctic wastelands to become the first woman to reach the North Pole. She becomes caught up in a whirling current that rushes her through walls of amber mists and drops her in the sweet-scented atmosphere of a land lying in the earth's interior—Mizora, a three-thousand-year-old feminist utopia.