A World of Women
A World of Women
The Radium Age Book Series
Joshua Glenn
Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2022
A World of Women, J. D. Beresford, 2022
The World Set Free, H. G. Wells, 2022
The Clockwork Man, E. V. Odle, 2022
A World of Women
J. D. Beresford
introduction by Astra Taylor
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This edition of A World of Women follows the text of the 1913 edition published by W. Heinemann, which is in the public domain. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Arnhem Pro and PF DIN Text Pro by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beresford, J. D. (John Davys), 1873–1947, author. | Taylor, Astra, writer of introduction.
Title: A world of women / J. D. Beresford ; introduction by Astra Taylor.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022] | Series: The radium age series | “This edition of A World of Women follows the text of the 1913 edition published by W. Heinemann, which is in the public domain”
Identifiers: LCCN 2021010585 | ISBN 9780262543354 (paperback)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction. | Dystopias.
Classification: LCC PR6003.E73 W67 2022 | DDC 823/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010585
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Contents
Series Foreword
Introduction: Out of the Wreckage
Astra Taylor
Book I The New Plague
1 The Gosling Family
2 The Opinions of Jasper Thrale
3 London’s Incredulity
4 Mr Barker’s Flair
5 The Closed Door
6 Disaster
7 Panic
8 Gurney in Cornwall
9 The Devolution of George Gosling
10 Exodus
Book II The March of the Goslings
11 The Silent City
12 Emigrant
13 Differences
14 Aunt May
15 From Sudbury to Wycombe
16 The Young Butcher of High Wycombe
Book III Womankind in the Making
17 London to Marlow
18 Modes of Expression
19 On the Flood
20 The Terrors of Spring
21 Smoke
Epilogue: The Great Plan
Series Foreword
Joshua Glenn
Do we really know science fiction? There were the scientific romance years that stretched from the mid-nineteenth century to circa 1900. And there was the genre’s so-called golden age, from circa 1935 through the early 1960s. But between those periods, and overshadowed by them, was an era that has bequeathed us such tropes as the robot (berserk or benevolent), the tyrannical superman, the dystopia, the unfathomable extraterrestrial, the sinister telepath, and the eco-catastrophe. A dozen years ago, writing for the sf blog io9.com at the invitation of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, I became fascinated with the period during which the sf genre as we know it emerged. Inspired by the exactly contemporaneous career of Marie Curie, who shared a Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium in 1903, only to die of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934, I eventually dubbed this three-decade interregnum the “Radium Age.”
Curie’s development of the theory of radioactivity, which led to the extraordinary, terrifying, awe-inspiring insight that the atom is, at least in part, a state of energy constantly in movement, is an apt metaphor for the twentieth century’s first three decades. These years were marked by rising sociocultural strife across various fronts: the founding of the women’s suffrage movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, socialist currents within the labor movement, anticolonial and revolutionary upheaval around the world . . . as well as the associated strengthening of reactionary movements that supported, for example, racial segregation, immigration restriction, eugenics, and sexist policies.
Science—as a system of knowledge, a mode of experimenting, and a method of reasoning—accelerated the pace of change during these years in ways simultaneously liberating and terrifying. As sf author and historian Brian Stableford points out in his 1989 essay “The Plausibility of the Impossible,” the universe we discovered by means of the scientific method in the early twentieth century defies common sense: “We are haunted by a sense of the impossibility of ultimately making sense of things.” By playing host to certain far-out notions—time travel, faster-than-light travel, and ESP, for example—that we have every reason to judge impossible, science fiction serves as an “instrument of negotiation,” Stableford suggests, with which we strive to accomplish “the difficult diplomacy of existence in a scientifically knowable but essentially unimaginable world.” This is no less true today than during the Radium Age.
The social, cultural, political, and technological upheavals of the 1900–1935 period are reflected in the proto-sf writings of authors such as Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Muriel Jaeger, Karel Čapek, G. K. Chesterton, Cicely Hamilton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E. V. Odle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pauline Hopkins, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Aldous Huxley, Gustave Le Rouge, A. Merritt, Rudyard Kipling, Rose Macaulay, J. D. Beresford, J. J. Connington, S. Fowler Wright, Jack London, Thea von Harbou, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, not to mention the late-period but still incredibly prolific H. G. Wells himself. More cynical than its Victorian precursor yet less hard-boiled than the sf that followed, in the writings of these visionaries we find acerbic social commentary, shock tactics, and also a sense of frustrated idealism—and reactionary cynicism, too—regarding humankind’s trajectory.
The MIT Press’s Radium Age series represents a much-needed evolution of my own efforts to champion the best proto-sf novels and stories from 1900 to 1935 among scholars already engaged in the fields of utopian and speculative fiction studies, as well as general readers interested in science, technology, history, and thrills and chills. By reissuing literary productions from a time period that hasn’t received sufficient attention for its contribution to the emergence of science fiction as a recognizable form—one that exists and has meaning in relation to its own traditions and innovations, as well as within a broader ecosystem of literary genres, each of which, as John Rieder notes in Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), is itself a product of overlapping “communities of practice”—we hope not only to draw attention to key overlooked works but perhaps also to influence the way scholars and sf fans alike think about this crucial yet neglected and misunderstood moment in the emergence of the sf genre.
John W. Campbell and other Cold War–era sf editors and propagandists dubbed a select group of writers and story types from the pulp era to be the golden age of science fiction. In doing so, they helped fix in the popular imagination a too-narrow understanding of what the sf genre can offer. (In his introduction to the 1974 collection Before the Golden Age, for example, Isaac Asimov notes that although it may have possessed a certain exuberance, in general sf from before the mid-1930s moment when Campbell assumed editorship of Astounding Stories “seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive.”) By returning to an international tradition of scientific spe
culation via fiction from after the Poe–Verne–Wells era and before sf’s Golden Age, the Radium Age series will demonstrate—contra Asimov et al.—the breadth, richness, and diversity of the literary works that were responding to a vertiginous historical period, and how they helped innovate a nascent genre (which wouldn’t be named until the mid-1920s, by Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories and namesake of the Hugo Awards) as a mode of speculative imagining.
The MIT Press’s Noah J. Springer and I are grateful to the sf writers and scholars who have agreed to serve as this series’ advisory board. Aided by their guidance, we’ll endeavor to surface a rich variety of texts, along with introductions by a diverse group of sf scholars, sf writers, and others that will situate these remarkable, entertaining, forgotten works within their own social, political, and scientific contexts, while drawing out contemporary parallels.
We hope that reading Radium Age writings, published in times as volatile as our own, will serve to remind us that our own era’s seemingly natural, eternal, and inevitable social, economic, and cultural forms and norms are—like Madame Curie’s atom—forever in flux.
Introduction: Out of the Wreckage
Astra Taylor
I first read J. D. Beresford’s A World of Women in 2013, one hundred years after it was published. I turned the pages, illuminated by the faint glow of a flashlight, in a little cabin after the power was knocked out by Hurricane Sandy, which roared over upstate New York.
I had gathered provisions that would last four or five days: non-perishable goods, bottled water, batteries, firewood. The powerful storm caused the trees to bend, arching almost to the ground. The sound of trunks and branches snapping echoed through the night. That evening, before my phone died, I saw photos shared by friends who had stayed in New York City. Lower Manhattan had gone dark and flooded. Cars were floating in parking garages like apples in a barrel. People were wading down Avenue C. Subway stations had morphed into filthy aquariums.
For the next few days New Yorkers were alerted to the long-repressed fact of their city’s fragility. Buildings that had seemed immutable the day before, gleaming as part of Manhattan’s famous skyline, were dark and waterlogged, uninhabitable and abandoned. Locals reported of getting lost in neighborhoods in which they had lived for years, familiar intersections made eerie by quiet and lack of light. In hard-hit regions—lower Manhattan, the shorelines in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey—thousands were homeless while others, elderly or infirm, were trapped in their homes. Traffic tunnels were impassable and commuter trains stuck. Gasoline was soon rationed, the lines for fuel snaking for blocks.
Though the situation was unprecedented in recent memory, people kept remarking that the experience felt oddly familiar. Sandy opened an uncanny window onto a doomsday future that we have already seen at the movies and read about in books—books like A World of Women, an early example of apocalyptic science fiction.
When I again picked up the book seven years after my initial encounter with it, the distance between fiction and reality had further closed. The novel imagines a plague that devastates humanity, and I was living through a pandemic—though fortunately not one as virulent as Beresford’s fabrication. I revisited the novel in my living room, after having barely left my home in nine months—an astonishing change in daily routine that began when the coronavirus pandemic caused the United States to shut down in March of 2020.
As of this writing, Covid-19, a disease that first emerged in Wuhan, China, has claimed over 1.5 million lives and caused a global recession, evaporating tens of millions of jobs in the United States alone. The initial epicenter of the US outbreak, New York City, was a ghost town for weeks, with sirens blaring day and night as bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks parked outside overwhelmed hospitals. In hindsight, Hurricane Sandy looked like child’s play.
“Seems this new plague’s spreadin’ in China.” So goes the first mention of Beresford’s imaginary illness, uttered by George Gosling, a striving businessman and father whose two daughters will soon have to learn self-reliance amidst society’s wreckage. Beresford’s gripping tale, which in the UK was titled Goslings, chronicles the spread of a lethal pathogen that nearly wipes out the planet’s male population. (Mr. Gosling turns out to be one of a tiny handful of men who are immune.) As the vast majority of menfolk perish, modern civilization slowly ceases to function. London, the bustling metropolis around which the story is set, shuts down: factories no longer churn out merchandise, farms no longer produce food, Parliament empties, laws go unheeded, and nature begins to reclaim stone and steel. Women and a handful of male survivors persevere, trekking to the countryside to scratch out a life on the land.
It’s a tale of devastation, to be sure, but also one of tenacity and triumph. As civilization crumbles, Beresford’s main characters discover hidden strength and talent and the freedom to articulate criticisms of the old social order they never would have uttered otherwise. A resilient minority represents hope for a radically transformed and improved future, and an end to hierarchies based on class or gender.
Like many others, I hoped that the coronavirus would be a wake-up call, an opportunity for people to recognize a shared solidarity in vulnerability as we coped with a terrible international crisis. As frontline and essential workers heroically reported for their jobs while millions sheltered in place, we imagined that the result might be a society in which risk and reward were more fairly distributed and care work better valued. Instead, the disease provoked denial. Following President Trump’s lead, the right wing claimed it was hoax and denounced public health protocols, including simple face masks, as a form of tyranny. The president boasted of bogus miracle cures while condemning hundreds of thousands of Americans to death, and millions to destitution.
I should have known better than to be optimistic, especially with Trump at the country’s helm. Hurricane Sandy, too, was heralded as just such a turning point, and the possibility of a mass awakening about the dangers of climate change suffused my first reading of A World Of Women, which is threaded by a similar positivity. It didn’t take long for us to realize that Hurricane Sandy was not the jolt we had been hoping for. Climate change profiteers weren’t sanctioned in any way and regular people’s lives were turned upside down. In Staten Island a month after the storm, thousands of residents were still living in shelters or their cars. “The vultures are circling our community,” one woman told me during a reporting expedition. “They see valuable beachfront property, not a place where families live.”
There are vultures and hucksters in Beresford’s novel too, before and after the plague—like the lecherous and avaricious Mr. Gosling, who urges his firm to make financial investments based on the disease’s imminence; the wealthy politicians who stampede to America in an attempt to outrun fate; and the male survivors who become libertines, taking advantage of the scarcity of competition for female attention. Doubters and opportunists abound. “The Evening Chronicle has even fallen back on the ‘New Plague’ for the sake of news,” one of the novel’s characters cynically pronounces, ignorant of the devastation to come. Evangelicals crow about “judgement,” joyously convinced mass destruction signals their righteousness.
Experts promise the pestilence will work itself out, and maintain that protecting lives is bad for business: “Nevertheless, despite this one intimidating aspect of the plague, the general attitude in the middle of March was that the quarantine arrangements were enormously impeding trade and should be relaxed.”
Women too, are complicated characters, though it appears Beresford generally preferred them to their masculine counterparts: some hoard, some steal, and some even kill. While the hero and heroines of A World Of Women embrace the opportunity to build the foundation of a new society from scratch, many of the women they encounter cling to the old ways and outmoded beliefs. They judge and persecute and conform, almost as if the plague had never happened.
While Beresford takes a novelist’s pleasure in describing the pa
ndemic’s arrival and the adventure that ensues, long passages are devoted to conceptual reflections. The plague opens a space for the expression of new ideas about how to live—ideas that overlap with the progressive values Beresford espoused. In the English countryside a group of women, aided by one thoughtful man, put some of these ideas into action, forming a sort of agrarian commune informally organized around principles of self-reliance, cooperation, and even vegetarianism. Beresford makes an impressive attempt to envision a new social order, and though he doesn’t manage to totally escape the prejudices of his day (no one does), his evident socialism and feminism resonate in this period of political turmoil and resurgent left-wing idealism.
Seen through the eyes of Beresford’s protagonists, the plague was an atrocity . . . yet it’s not clear they would turn back the clock if they could. Viewed from a certain perspective, the outbreak produced desirable social effects not easily achieved through other means: freeing women to break out of prescribed habits and social roles (smashing patriarchy by all but eliminating men), for example.
The disease also challenges our species’ delusional conviction that the Earth is our dominion. “It is no longer safe to comfort ourselves with the belief begotten of our vanity that the world was necessarily made for man,” one of the book’s central figures muses in a widely read newspaper column, published just before the printing presses cease operations. The coronavirus pandemic ought to spark a similar epiphany. Like other zoonotic diseases (avian flu, Ebola, HIV), Covid-19 jumped from another species to a human body because of our voracious encroachment on the natural world and relentless exploitation of other animals.
It’s a dark thing to put your faith in catastrophe. Though disasters do occasionally serve as turning points (Ohio’s 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, which helped lead to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, is one example), more often they do not. The California forest fires that charred over four million acres in 2020 offer a depressing counterpoint. Yet some continue to cling, all the same, to the twisted logic that things have to get worse in order to get better. As the 2020 US presidential election approached, and Donald Trump faced off against Joe Biden, I occasionally heard self-identified radicals insist that a second Trump turn would somehow lead to positive social change by accelerating social breakdown. In fact, I countered, it would only hasten the arrival of authoritarianism.