Elizabeth G. Birkmaier

Born Elizabeth Green Davey in Baltimore in 1845, she later married George Lewis Birkmaier and lived for a time in Alameda, California, where the couple raised three children. She died in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1912.

Her best-known book is Poseidon's Paradise: The Romance of Atlantis (1892), a novel that imagines Atlantis at the height of its power. The book has had a long afterlife: it remains available through major digital archives, and later reference works have singled it out as an early American Atlantis romance.

Birkmaier is also remembered as a clubwoman, which places her among the many women who built literary and civic communities in the 19th century. Even with only a small surviving body of work, she has kept a place in discussions of overlooked women writers and the early history of speculative fiction.