BookList - Whitney Scott
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."