author
Elizabeth Waterhouse
1834–1918
A Quaker writer of religious studies, tracts, poems, and fiction, she brought moral seriousness and a reform-minded imagination to her work. Her rare speculative pieces also give her a small but interesting place in early utopian writing.
1 Audiobook
The island of anarchy: A fragment of history in the 20th century
by Elizabeth Waterhouse
About the author
Born in 1834, Elizabeth Waterhouse was a British author and compiler whose work was largely shaped by her Quaker background. Reliable reference sources describe her as a writer of religious studies and tracts, and bibliographic records also note her work as a poet and novelist.
She is now remembered mainly for nonfiction with a devotional or reformist character, but she also wrote fiction, including The Island of Anarchy: A Fragment of History in the 20th Century. The SFE Encyclopedia of Science Fiction also credits her with The Brotherhood of Rest (1886), a short utopian work that imagines a retreat built around ideals of rest and social renewal.
Waterhouse died in 1918. Although she is not widely known today, her writing offers a glimpse of the strong link between faith, social thought, and imaginative literature in late Victorian Britain.