Proud Man »

   Originally published in England in 1934, this searing, timely novel offers and incisive critique of the sexual politics and militarism of England, and the West as a whole, in the post-World War I years. The novel is told from the perspective of a "Genuine Person" who has been hurtled thousands of years back in time from a future society whose citizens are peaceful, androgynous, self-fertilizing, vegetarian, and without national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the Genuine Person confronts the reality of England in the 1930s: a society deeply troubled by fascism, the aftermath of war, gender and class divisions, religious hypocrisy, national chauvinism, and the breakdown of families and other social institutions. The protagonist is drawn into relationships with a priest who teachers her/him the English language, a woman struggling with sexual politics and sexual identity, and a man haunted by a murder he committed, driven by his deeply ingrained hatred and fear of women. This powerful novel by a master of dystopian fiction raises disturbing questions about war and peace and the nature of human relationships in an oppressive culture.

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Originally published in 1934 under the pseudonym Murray Constantine and praised by Scottish poet Edwin Muir as "the most profound and brilliantly sustained satire that has appeared for many years," this visionary "speculative fiction" may become a rediscovered classic of feminist literature. Using the device of time travel, Burdekin places a protagonist who is both male and female, comes from an advanced future civilization, and is identified as the Person in England of the 1930s. The Person comments on that society with the distanced and often bemused glance of . . . a human, as opposed to the less evolved "subhumans" of the twentieth century. Given refuge and education by a priest, the Person lives first as a woman and then as a man, observing, revealing, and ultimately going on to heal, all with a coolness that sympathetically penetrates to the core of subhuman suffering: "A privilege of class divides a subhuman society horizontally, while a privilege of sex divides it vertically. Subhumans cannot apparently exist without their societies being divided, preferably in both these ways."