Lena Jane Fry

author

Lena Jane Fry

Best remembered for the 1905 novel Other Worlds, this Canadian-born American writer used imaginative fiction to tackle wealth, power, and social reform. Her work is now often noted as an early North American woman’s contribution to utopian literature.

1 Audiobook

Other Worlds A story concerning the wealth earned by American citizens and showing how it can be secured to them instead of to the trusts

Other Worlds A story concerning the wealth earned by American citizens and showing how it can be secured to them instead of to the trusts

by Lena Jane Fry

About the author

Born in Hawkesville, Ontario, in 1850, Lena Jane Hawke Fry later became a Canadian-born American writer whose surviving reputation rests mainly on Other Worlds (1905). The novel blends speculative storytelling with arguments about economics, trusts, and how wealth might be returned to the people who create it.

Biographical details about her life are limited, but available sources agree that she married Stephen Fry, had children, and later lived in the United States. She died in Chicago in 1938.

Today, Fry is most often remembered by readers of early speculative and reform fiction. Other Worlds has drawn renewed interest because it shows how boldly some women writers of the period used fiction to question inequality and imagine different social systems.