Mary E. Bradley Lane

Born in St. Marys, Ohio, in 1844, she was an American teacher and writer whose reputation rests mainly on Mizora: A Prophecy. The novel first appeared as a newspaper serial in the Cincinnati Commercial in 1880–81 and was later published in book form, helping secure her place among the early women writers of science fiction in the United States.

Her fiction is remembered for its feminist and utopian ideas. Mizora imagines a society of women shaped by education, technology, and social reform, and it is often noted as an unusually early example of feminist speculative fiction. That forward-looking vision is a big part of why her work continues to be rediscovered by modern readers.

Although not much biographical detail is widely documented beyond the basics, she is generally identified as Mary E. Bradley Lane and is recorded as having died in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1930. Today, her name is most often linked with the lasting influence of Mizora, a novel that gave nineteenth-century science fiction one of its most distinctive feminist voices.