Elizabeth G. Birkmaier

Elizabeth Green Davey Birkmaier was an American writer and clubwoman who lived from 1845 to 1912. She is chiefly remembered for Poseidon's Paradise: The Romance of Atlantis (1892), a novel that imagines the legendary lost continent in a sweeping mix of romance, legend, and disaster.

Reference works describe her as a U.S. author associated with early speculative fiction, and her Atlantis novel is the work most often linked to her name. The book was published in San Francisco, which also connects her to California literary and social circles of the period.

Not much about her life is widely documented beyond those core facts, which makes her one of those intriguing authors whose reputation rests on a single unusual book. That rarity is part of the appeal: she offers a glimpse of how nineteenth-century writers used ancient myths to tell grand, imaginative stories long before modern fantasy and science fiction took their familiar forms.