A World of Women by J.D. Beresford

(MIT, 2022)

Reviewed by Dan Hartland

There is something odd about reading this new edition of J.D. Beresford’s 1913 novel, A World of Women (originally published in Great Britain as Goslings). In it, a zoonotic virus travels the world from an apparent source in China, is met at first with denial and then incredulity, wrecks economies in the process, until finally techno futurists announce its potency is waning and the survivors look queasily towards an uncertain future. This is an experience described in Astra Taylor’s introduction to this MIT Press volume: she has read the novel twice, once while sheltering-in-place during Hurricane Sandy and once during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 era. This shapes her experience of the novel.

A World of Women, however, is a more complex book than its superficial similarities to recent history might suggest, and it would be a shame to read it only in relation to this cognate experience—or even in the shadow of disaster literature more widely. As its original British title suggests, the novel’s story is rather domestic. It focuses on the Goslings, a decidedly upper-middle-class London family fixated, when the novel begins, on achieving and consolidating final elevation into the undisputed upper class. This involves much financial wheeling and dealing by Mr Gosling—who, in a sign of his anxieties, speaks throughout in a perhaps overly-stylised (but perhaps because deliberately forced) accent: “Where’s the gels gone to?” is both the novel’s and his first, grating, line.

It is characteristic of Beresford’s light but subtle style that this simultaneously and immediately establishes a key element of Mr Gosling’s character, the patriarchal nature of the novel’s frame—the man speaks, and he is seeking to locate the women—but also the novel’s true focus: the “gels”, and where they get to. Indeed, A World of Women is an extremely well written novel, which depicts the end of society as we know it—this particular Chinese virus infects and kills almost every man it meets, resulting in the total destruction of a male-dominated civilisation—with an almost Eliotian wryness, employing a gentle third person which conveys with detachment but not dismissal the absurdity and also the profundity of the novel’s events.

This isn’t an effect much in vogue in current fiction, perhaps because it reflects a certain confidence or smugness that literature has for the most part happily done away with. But Beresford is nevertheless quietly, and for its time quite deeply, radical. Take, for example, the moment when the Gosling daughters take a trip to the ruins of the Houses of Parliament, a site which for many less conventional thinkers in 1913 represented the very pinnacle of imperial civilisation: “Gone were the rules and formulas […] The high talk of progress had died into silence […] from the sky had fallen a pestilence to change the meaning of human terms” (p. 147).

It is in Beresford’s treatment of women that this political vision is given its clearest embodiment. It would be easy to raise a knowing eyebrow at the novel’s Edwardian commonplaces—“And where’d you be, and all the rest of the women, if you ’and’t got no men to look after you?” (p. 9)—and indeed its women themselves often conspire to encourage our cynicism: Mrs Gosling, for instance is entirely indolent, wholly incapable of living a life without servants and luxuries, “a specialized creature, admirably adapted to her place in the old scheme of civilization” (p. 155). But Beresford makes clear that these women are victims of a system which has babied them, and the daughters slowly awake to their more practical and capable natures, inspired in part by a woman they meet in the countryside, who—in this genteel novel’s first moment of explicit violence—casually describes killing “three madwomen who fought me for possession and [burying] ’em in the orchard like cats” (p. 165). These women—their society—should never have been in the position of being reliant on men. They—and it—are capable of existing without them.

A World of Women is not, then, really a pandemic novel at all. It is a political work, a utopia. Still, it uses a virus as its novum, and here begin its difficulties. Like any other work that kills off half the population to make a speculative point, A World of Women indulges in binary essentialism. Fifteen years after Beresford published this novel, Penguin would publish Woolf’s Orlando; if Beresford never overly worries about the mechanics of his virus—“it was never studied under the microscope” (p. 310)—it nevertheless remains a rather crude conceit, invisibilising many. The story ends with one Gosling daughter reflecting “that she was neither greater nor less than any man present” (p. 310), but this early feminism is not quite as wise as it might have been.

For all the novel’s radicalism and contemporary resonance, then, it is embedded in its age. Indeed, the series in which this edition appears emphasises its conformity with the moment in which it was produced: for series editor Joshua Glenn, this novel is one of the quintessential works of what he calls “the Radium Age”, arguing that we do not “really know science fiction” unless we reflect on the apparently neglected period between 1900 and 1935, when the literature became characterised by “a state of energy constantly in movement” (p. vii). It was many decades ago that Aldiss and Wingrove characterised the first decades of the twentieth century as ones in which a key concern became “radium power bringing the millennium” (Trillion Year Spree, p. 151), so perhaps Glenn overdoes his revisionism. But certainly Beresford’s work, for all its innovations, is embedded in a revulsion of this period towards contemporary society—and a pre-Raphaelite yearning for something simpler (News From Nowhere had been published in 1890). In this ill-fated fin di siècle response lies the source of some of the novel’s most antediluvian—and also most utopian—impulses. To reiterate, then: this is an accomplished but awkward work. MIT’s reprint should allow it a productive critical rediscovery.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.