Tonight, we’ll be reading the opening chapters of “New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future”, written by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett under the pen name “Mrs. James Corbett” and first published in 1889. Categorized as “feminist utopian”, it was one element in the wave of utopian and dystopian literature that marked the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her novel, Corbett envisions a successful suffragette movement eventually giving rise to a breed of highly evolved "Amazonians" who turn Ireland into a utopian society.

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