Flaneuse (1 results)

First edition. 158 pages. Undated but circa 1913. Staple-bound, in the original wraps illustrated by C. R. Rhodes, these are grubby, age toned, creased and rubbed, with minor chips and closed tears to the edges. The text block is age toned, slightly marked and foxed, with creasing and softening at the page corners. One of a large number of titles published under the "Flaneuse" pseudonym between 1910 and 1920, this particular title seemingly unrepresented in library holdings worldwide. As the pseudonym indicates the books tend to deal with the concerns and desires of liberated, independently minded young women, and it is presumably no accident that the cover illustration emphasises the suffragette colours, purple, white and green. This one is an interplanetary fantasy, or rather the hallucination of apparent interplanetary travel by an attractive married woman under the influence of gas during a tooth extraction, to the liberated utopian planet Lilac Loveland, where sex and romance without marital commitment are the rule and people do not physically age. There she engages enthusiastically in flirtations and intrigues before settling down to a passionate, sexual love affair, without much regret about her husband left on earth. Highly entertaining, subversive and risqué pre-WW1 pulp fiction, evocative of the era of women's suffrage and the rise of enthusiasm for radical communist ideology, and decidedly rare.