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Beatrice the Sixteenth

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Beatrice the Sixteenth
First edition title page
AuthorIrene Clyde
LanguageEnglish
Genres
PublisherGeorge Bell & Sons
Publication date1909
Publication placeUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages338
OCLC557866271

Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer is a 1909 feminist utopian novel by Irene Clyde, a name used by the English lawyer, writer and activist Thomas Baty. It follows Mary Hatherley, a geographical explorer who reaches Armeria, a lost world society without clear binary gender distinctions. Armeria is a monarchy organised around communal life and lifelong partnerships, and its inhabitants follow a vegetarian diet.

The novel is presented as a first-person travel narrative. It combines speculative fiction and romance, and treats gender, companionship, marriage and social organisation. The narrative initially avoids gendered pronouns. Later critics have discussed the novel in relation to Clyde's rejection of binary gender, the critique of heterosexual marriage, and Clyde's later editorial work on the feminist journal Urania.

Scholars have read the novel as a radical feminist, postgender, queer and transgender text. Critics have also noted its idealised presentation of Armeria, its inclusion of slavery, its preservation of class distinctions, and its use of binary oppositions such as Armeria and Uras, or free people and slaves. Although the novel departs from conventional gender roles, scholars have argued that its institution of monogamous partnership, or "conjux", retains elements of marriage. The novel was little read after publication, but has since been discussed in scholarship on speculative fiction, transgender literature and LGBTQ literature.

Background

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Cover of Urania, May–August 1936

Beatrice the Sixteenth was written under the name Irene Clyde, an identity used privately by Thomas Baty, an English international lawyer, legal scholar and activist. In literary and political writing, Clyde criticised binary gender systems and traditional gender roles. Clyde later co-founded and co-edited the privately circulated journal Urania, which rejected the division of humanity into two sexes and promoted a postgender ideal.[1][2]

Clyde's fiction and editorial work addressed gender norms, heterosexual marriage and same-sex companionship. Beatrice the Sixteenth has been discussed in this context as a literary treatment of a society beyond gender binaries, and as part of the tradition of early 20th-century feminist utopias.[3]

Modern scholars have characterised Baty's gender identity in varied ways, with some describing Clyde as non-binary, genderfluid, transgender or a trans woman, drawing on Clyde's writing and personal statements expressing a rejection of male identity and an affinity with femininity.[4]: 21–22 [5][6] These interpretations have informed later readings of the novel in relation to early transgender and LGBTQ literature.[1][7]

Publication history

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The first edition was published in 1909 by George Bell & Sons in London.[8] It was also published by Macmillan in New York.[9] The novel sold poorly, and unsold copies remained with the publisher into the 1950s.[10]

A reprint was later published by Mint Editions.[11] A new edition was released in 2026 by MIT Press, with an introduction by Lucy Sante, as part of its Radium Age series, which reissues proto-science fiction works from 1900 to 1935.[12][13]

Plot summary

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Mary Hatherley, a geographical explorer travelling through a desert with an Arab escort, is knocked unconscious by a camel. She wakes among a group of people dressed in brown robes with yellow stripes. Travelling with them, she reaches Armeria, a secluded society ruled by Queen Beatrice the Sixteenth.

Mary is introduced to Armerian life through Ilex, a high-ranking official who hosts her and explains local customs. Armeria has no clear gender distinctions and its language lacks grammatical gender. Its inhabitants live communally, pursue artistic and intellectual interests, and follow a vegetarian diet, having ceased slaughtering animals more than a thousand years earlier. Slavery exists in Armeria, though the narrative presents enslaved people as part of society.

As Mary becomes familiar with Armerian society, she learns of its lifelong partnerships, known as "conjux". These partnerships are based on love and companionship rather than sex. The Armerians are unable to reproduce, and infants are obtained through exchange with neighbouring peoples.

Conflict arises between Armeria and the neighbouring Uras people, who seek to overthrow Queen Beatrice and conquer Armeria. Mary accompanies Ilex and other scouts into the mountains and caves to search for signs of the Uras forces. They are attacked, and Mary becomes more closely involved in the defence of Armeria.

The conflict culminates in battle, in which Mary witnesses the deaths and injuries of Armerians she has come to know. The narrative contrasts Armerian social ideals with the aggression of Uras and presents the defence of Armeria as a test of its communal order.

At the end of the novel, Mary remains in Armeria and forms a conjux with Ilex. The manuscript is presented as having been sent by Mary to a friend in Scotland, who arranges for its publication by Irene Clyde.

Themes

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Defamiliarisation

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Daphne Patai describes Beatrice the Sixteenth as an example of defamiliarisation, because it initially presents a society without gender markers and challenges the reader's assumptions about gender categorisation.[14]

Gender and sexuality

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Beatrice the Sixteenth has been cited as a precursor to later feminist utopias and modern radical feminist thought on gender and sexuality.[3] Commentators note that the novel initially avoids gendered pronouns, referring to characters as "figure", "person" or "personage", but later increasingly uses feminine pronouns and stresses feminine traits.[15] Although Armeria is presented as a genderless society, scholars including Sonja Tiernan argue that the characters are effectively female.[16] Emily Hamer describes the book as a lesbian love story.[10]

Clyde's approach to gender has been contrasted with Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which uses masculine pronouns for its agender characters.[14] The novel has also been compared to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Tiernan describes Clyde's novel as the more radical of the two.[16] It has also been discussed as an early work of transgender literature.[7]

Critique of heterosexual marriage

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Tiernan argues that the novel offers a sustained critique of heterosexual marriage, portraying it as an institution rooted in inequality and incompatible with companionship. In her reading, marriage is presented as redeemable only when reimagined as a relationship between individuals of the same gender. Tiernan situates Beatrice the Sixteenth within the anti-marriage discourse later associated with Urania, and argues that the novel presents same-gender partnerships as an alternative to traditional, gendered unions.[16]

Reception

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Contemporary reviews

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Review in The Guardian, 1 December 1909

A reviewer for The Nautilus described the novel as well written and interesting, and commented that its characters seemed real.[9] The Theosophist suggested that "Adventures of Mary Hatherley" would have been a more fitting title, while approving of the vegetarianism of the Armerians.[17] The Herald of the Cross read the novel as conveying a spiritual and occult message, representing the soul's journey on an occult plane of consciousness.[18]

Louise Radford Wells found the novel unusual and wrote that she was initially confused by the genders of the characters, later realising that each heroine was also a hero. She concluded that the book was well written and entertaining.[19] The Guardian speculated that the author might have been a suffragist, describing the society in the book as appealing but insufficiently explained. The reviewer found the book's style incoherent, while acknowledging its ideas.[20]

A reviewer for Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult and Mystical Research described the book's setting as unusual and difficult to understand, and argued that this made the story less engaging.[21]

Modern scholarship

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Melanie Taylor describes the novel as highly unrealistic and stylistically dense.[15]: 401  She argues that it presents an idealised version of an entirely female world, but does not constitute a genuine utopia because Armeria is built on hierarchy, slavery and binary divisions.[15]: 403  Taylor also argues that the conjux system preserves Western conventions of monogamy and marriage.[15]: 403 

Matt Polzin argues that Clyde's imagined future society abolishes gender while relying on other systems of classification, including colonial hierarchies. Polzin argues that utopian worldbuilding is more effective when writers consider histories of racial and colonial violence and existing cultural and ecological relationships in the places that utopian fiction often treats as blank spaces for invention.[22]

Lucy Ella Rose argues that Clyde's treatment of enslavement shows elitist and hierarchical tendencies in the work. Rose writes that, although Clyde seeks to abolish sex and gender divisions and to elevate lesbian intimacy, the novel also reinforces class and social status divisions. She connects these features to other white middle-class feminist writings of the interwar period and to wider debates in literary and scientific modernism.[1]

Cheryl Morgan observes that, despite the novel's treatment of gender, it portrays a utopia in which slavery is legal, comparing this limitation with Thomas More's Utopia.[23]

References

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  1. 1 2 3 Funke, Jana (2023). "Lesbian-trans-feminist modernism and sexual science: Irene Clyde and Urania". In Carroll, Rachel; Tolan, Fiona (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-00-342995-1.
  2. ↑ White, Jenny (18 May 2021). "Jenny White reflects on the legacy of Urania". LSE Review of Books. London School of Economics. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  3. 1 2 Ferreira, Maria A. (2005). I Am the Other: Literary Negotiations of Human Cloning. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-313-32006-4.
  4. ↑ Maait Pepperell, T. (September 2022). A Monastery of Their Own: Imagining a Utopia from the Aëthnic Union to Urania (PDF) (Master's thesis). University of Essex. Retrieved 4 July 2024.
  5. ↑ Duffy, Sandra (4 November 2023). "Postcolonial Dynamics in Pro- and Anti-Trans Activism in the United Kingdom and Ireland". Feminists@law. 12 (2). doi:10.22024/UNIKENT/03/FAL.1086.
  6. ↑ Oram, Alison (June 2001). "Feminism, Androgyny and Love between Women in Urania, 1916–1940". Media History. 7 (1): 57–70. doi:10.1080/1368800120048245. PMID 21046841 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  7. 1 2 Cugini, Eli (15 September 2021). "The troubled golden age of trans literature". Xtra Magazine. Retrieved 26 February 2022.
  8. ↑ "Publication: Beatrice the Sixteenth". The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  9. 1 2 "Books and Things" (PDF). The Nautilus. 12 (11). Holyoke, Massachusetts: Elizabeth Towne: 56. September 1910 – via IAPSOP.
  10. 1 2 Hamer, Emily (2016). Britannia's Glory: A History of Twentieth Century Lesbians. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 67–68. ISBN 978-1-4742-9280-1.
  11. ↑ "Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer (Mint Editions (Reading with Pride))". MIT Press Bookstore. 6 June 2023. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
  12. ↑ "Beatrice the Sixteenth (MIT Press / Radium Age)". MIT Press Bookstore. 31 March 2026. Retrieved 29 May 2025.
  13. ↑ "Radium Age". MIT Press. Retrieved 29 May 2025.
  14. 1 2 Patai, Daphne (Spring 1982). "When Women Rule: Defamiliarization in the Sex-Role Reversal Utopia". Extrapolation. 23 (1): 56–69. doi:10.3828/extr.1982.23.1.56. Retrieved 29 May 2025.
  15. 1 2 3 4 Taylor, Melanie (July 2000). Changing Subjects: Transgender Consciousness and the 1920s (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of York. Retrieved 29 May 2025.
  16. 1 2 3 Tiernan, Sonja (2008). "'Engagements Dissolved:' Eva Gore-Booth, Urania and the Challenge to Marriage". In McAuliffe, Mary; Tiernan, Sonja (eds.). Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives: Histories of Sexualities. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 128–144. ISBN 978-1-84718-592-1 – via Academia.edu.
  17. ↑ A. G. (January 1910). "In Womanland" (PDF). The Theosophist. 31 (4): 538.
  18. ↑ "Book Notices". The Herald of the Cross. 6. Bradford and London: Percy Lund, Humphries & Co.: 256. 1910 – via Internet Archive.
  19. ↑ Wells, Louise Radford (December 1909). "Holiday Fiction" (PDF). New Thought. Chicago: New Thought Publishing Co.: 460.
  20. ↑ M. C. (1 December 1909). "New Novels". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  21. ↑ "Tales from Other Spheres" (PDF). Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult and Mystical Research. 29 (1501): 500. 16 October 1909. Retrieved 20 March 2025 – via IAPSOP.
  22. ↑ "Grad Profile: Matt Polzin". The Humanities Institute. UC Santa Cruz. 28 October 2022. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  23. ↑ Morgan, Cheryl (14 February 2025). "Fantastic Fiction: Trans Writers in the 20th Century?". Seattle Worldcon 2025. Retrieved 29 May 2025.

Further reading

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