Mary E. Bradley Lane

Mary E. Bradley Lane was an American teacher and writer born in St. Marys, Ohio, in 1844. She is remembered today as an early voice in feminist science fiction and is often noted as one of the first women in the United States to publish a science fiction novel.

Her best-known work, Mizora: A Prophecy, first appeared as a newspaper serial in The Cincinnati Commercial in 1880–1881 and was later published in book form in 1890. The novel imagines an advanced all-women society and has stayed important for readers interested in utopian fiction, speculative fiction, and women’s literary history.

Sources also mention a second novel, Escanaba, published in 1895, though it is described as lost. Lane died in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1930. Despite how little is widely known about her life, Mizora has kept her place in the history of imaginative and trailblazing American fiction.