Sublime

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened—one of these young women bore a child.

Widowed at twenty-two, Laura had one daughter, Peggy, to whom she devoted her life. When Peggy was sixteen, she confided to her mother that she was pregnant and that the lover who had promised to marry her had deserted her. “Well-meaning friends” advised an abortion and told Smith, “There is a way. Hide this thing from sight, send her on a journey.

Unlike most of the village women who embark on careers with foreign men, Noelline is educated, has completed two years at the lycée run by the sugar refinery at Ankazobe. She writes a fair hand in French orthography, can use a computer, and speaks good French and Italian. Besides her intelligence, her undeniable energy, and a reputed genius for sex

And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them—all girls.

‘She was the wife of John Bell, who owned Lowlands until his death in 1889, and we’ve never known anything more about her: it’s as if she’s been cut out of time. We have records of their marriage, but not of her death; we have no portraits of her anywhere, and when the house and contents were sold none of her possessions were listed in the inventor

ruth

There you have the start of Herland! One family, all descended from one mother! She lived to a hundred years old; lived to see her hundred and twenty-five great-granddaughters born; lived as Queen-Priestess-Mother of them all; and died with a nobler pride and a fuller joy than perhaps any human soul has ever known—she alone had founded a new race!