Mizora: A Prophecy
Mizora: A Prophecy
A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch
Being a true and faithful account of her Journey to theInterior of the Earth, with a careful description ofthe Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs,Manners and Government.
Book Excerpt
and on, and on I rowed until the shore and my late companions were lost in the gloomy distance. On and on, and still on, until fatigued almost to exhaustion; and still, no land. A feeling of uncontrollable lonesomeness took possession of me. Silence reigned supreme. No sound greeted me save the swirl of the gently undulating waters against the boat, and the melancholy dip of the oars. Overhead, the familiar eyes of night were all that pierced the gloom that seemed to hedge me in. My feeling of distress increased when I discovered that my boat had struck a current and was beyond my control. Visions of a cataract and inevitable death instantly shot across my mind. Made passive by intense despair, I laid down in the bottom of the boat, to let myself drift into whatever fate was awaiting me.
I must have lain there many hours before I realized that I was traveling in a circle. The velocity of the current had increased, but not sufficiently to insure immediately destruction. Hope began to revive, and I sat u
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A Russian lady exiled to Siberia escapes in a boat. Swallowed by a maelstrom, she falls in the women land of Mizora. The book describes that feminine paradise (poetry-heavy and with inconsistencies, mainly in the Mizoran language: it could not really have expressed ideas that are unknown in Mizora). Advanced Science gives synthetic food, parthenogenesis, no trouble at all, and everyone is a beautiful happy blonde. Gynotopias have existed in legend or literature since the Old Greeks, with the first European explorers of South America, and up to the present. Some of them may have been true matriarchies, others were tribes where men and women shared war or hunting, but most are just fantasy. Writers are often women, though not always. An incomplete English literary list is:
-Travels (1371), John Mandeville
-Mizora (1880), Mary E. Bradley
-New Amazonia (1889), 'George' Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett
-2894 (1894), Walter Browne
-Herland (1915) -also in Many Books-, With Her in Our Land (1916), Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-Travels (1371), John Mandeville
-Mizora (1880), Mary E. Bradley
-New Amazonia (1889), 'George' Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett
-2894 (1894), Walter Browne
-Herland (1915) -also in Many Books-, With Her in Our Land (1916), Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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