Ella Merchant

Ella Robinson Merchant was an American writer and editor born in 1857 who is most closely associated with Unveiling a Parallel, published in 1893. The book first appeared under the shared pseudonym “Two Women of the West” and was later identified as a collaboration between Merchant and Alice Ilgenfritz Jones.

Merchant also had ties to newspaper work in the American Midwest and West. Historical sources connect her and her husband with newspaper publishing in Montana, Manchester, Iowa, and later Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she lived during the period linked to her best-known book.

Although only a small amount of biographical detail is widely preserved, her place in literary history is secure because Unveiling a Parallel is remembered as an early feminist utopian novel and an unusual nineteenth-century journey-to-Mars story. She died in 1916.