Queen and Games Mistress

Summary

Emily A. Bernhard Jackson reviews new editions of Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth and Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive as evidence that women and gender-nonconforming writers have a deeper history in science fiction and literary utopia than is often recognized. She finds Clyde’s women-only Armeria imaginatively and materially distinctive but fundamentally conservative, especially in its monarchy, rigid class hierarchy, child barter, and unchallenged slave labor. Ertz’s novel has a more preposterous premise—a games mistress becomes the last surviving woman and Queen of England—but Jackson argues that it succeeds through its attractive vision of technological and social reform, psychological insight, intrigue, and romance. Their republication recovers neglected feminist speculative fiction, though the two works offer sharply different social visions.

Highlights

• Every aspect of this simultaneously classist, sexist and feminist statement is reflected in Beatrice the Sixteenth. The novel tells the story of the explorer Dr Mary Hatherley, who, after being kicked in the head from a camel, finds herself transported from early- twentieth-century Arabia to Armeria, a country on a different “plane of existence” (as a resident astrologer eventually suggests), inhabited exclusively by women. The leisured class of this world are absolutely “ladies”, cultured and immersed in an existence of beautified leisure. Indeed, the book spends an inordinate amount of time detailing interior decor, lingering over descriptions of gilding, graceful stonework and richly wrought carvings that make plain its roots in decadence.
• The society is ruled by a queen (the titular Beatrice); the women form couples and marry (no ethical non-monogamy here). That they also acquire children by bartering for them with “the barbarians”, who receive “carpets and woven tissues of the commonest kind” in exchange, is briefly frowned over, then brushed away.
• When Mary asks one of them if they have the possibility of freedom, the slave responds: “If we are as good as them [their mistresses] – as fine … and as dignified – we have a right … But how are we to get to be like that?”
• Woman Alive begins with one Dr Selwyn being transported from London in the mid-1930s to 1985, by means of a telepathic mind meld. In this future London, women are dying from a disease that is the byproduct of a war started by men. Only women are susceptible, and before we are even a quarter of the way through this slim novel, they are all dead. Or are they? It transpires that one woman has secretly remained alive, rendered impervious by a quack who covered her in dye that, when absorbed by means of “a powerful ray”, made her immune to all diseases.
• Once the men left behind realize that there is no future, they live “dully and half- heartedly, merely existing” – the realization that in order to function happily, humans must have some sense that there is a future, even a future they may not live to see, is an acute one.
• If the book gives space to the old canard that, if women ran the world, there’d be no war, it’s a small price to pay for the rediscovery of a novel once lost to history that, with its republication, proves that history, as Graham Norton puts it in his charmingly perspicacious introduction, “was an old fool”.

Source

Author

Emily A. Bernhard Jackson

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Date

August 7, 2026

URL

https://www.the-tls.com/literature/fiction/beatrice-sixteenth-irene-clyde-woman-alive-susan-ertz-book-reviews-emily-a-bernhard-jackson ↗

Reviewed work

Beatrice the Sixteenth by Irene Clyde; Woman Alive by Susan Ertz