A World of Women
First edition, 1913
A World of Women (1913) by J. D. Beresford, published in Britain as Goslings, is a disaster novel that imagines the near-extinction of the male population through a global plague and the social collapse that follows. The early sections trace the Gosling family's flight from a dead London to an agrarian settlement near Marlow, using their experience to examine what Beresford describes as a "specialized" helplessness produced by Edwardian society, particularly among the middle classes, whose dependence on modern systems leaves them unable to adapt when those systems fail. This condition is embodied most clearly in the daughters Blanche and Millie, who initially cannot perform basic tasks or understand the sources of food, having always "depended on some fool of a man."
The novel arrives at something like hope, but earns it cautiously. The final image is of a ship from America, where the plague took a different form and men survived in greater numbers, appearing on the horizon at Land's End. The reconstruction Eileen envisions is stripped of marriage as an institution, of class hierarchy, and of enforced gender roles. It is a beginning, not a resolution, and Beresford refuses to make it feel like more than that.
Published two years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the novel approaches a women-dominated society as a condition imposed by catastrophe rather than as a utopian ideal, and the results are considerably more ambiguous than in Gilman's vision of female separatist harmony. Beresford was a significant figure in Edwardian literary culture, closely associated with H. G. Wells, whose influence on the novel's speculative framework is apparent. He would return to dystopian territory three decades later, co-authoring The Riddle of the Tower (1944) with Esmé Wynne-Tyson. The American edition was published by Macaulay under the title A World of Women; the British edition appeared simultaneously as Goslings, a title carrying more irony given the novel's portrait of a society learning, very slowly, to fend for itself.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound burgundy, gilt-stamped cloth. New York: The Macaulay Company, 1913. #11393.
Very good.
The novel arrives at something like hope, but earns it cautiously. The final image is of a ship from America, where the plague took a different form and men survived in greater numbers, appearing on the horizon at Land's End. The reconstruction Eileen envisions is stripped of marriage as an institution, of class hierarchy, and of enforced gender roles. It is a beginning, not a resolution, and Beresford refuses to make it feel like more than that.
Published two years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the novel approaches a women-dominated society as a condition imposed by catastrophe rather than as a utopian ideal, and the results are considerably more ambiguous than in Gilman's vision of female separatist harmony. Beresford was a significant figure in Edwardian literary culture, closely associated with H. G. Wells, whose influence on the novel's speculative framework is apparent. He would return to dystopian territory three decades later, co-authoring The Riddle of the Tower (1944) with Esmé Wynne-Tyson. The American edition was published by Macaulay under the title A World of Women; the British edition appeared simultaneously as Goslings, a title carrying more irony given the novel's portrait of a society learning, very slowly, to fend for itself.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound burgundy, gilt-stamped cloth. New York: The Macaulay Company, 1913. #11393.
Very good.
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