author
Zebina Forbush
Best known for a single, unusual 1898 novel, this little-documented writer imagined Idaho transformed into a cooperative commonwealth. The book stands out as an early American utopian story with a strong interest in social reform and gender equality.
1 Audiobook
The Co-opolitan: A Story of the Co-operative Commonwealth of Idaho
by Zebina Forbush
About the author
Published under the pseudonym Zebina Forbush, Frances H. Clarke is credited with The Co-opolitan: A Story of the Co-operative Commonwealth of Idaho (1898). Reference sources and Project Gutenberg both connect the pen name to Clarke and identify this novel as the work most closely associated with the author.
The Co-opolitan pictures a future cooperative society in Idaho and has been noted by reference works as a utopian novel in which women are effectively equal with men. That mix of political imagination, reform-minded thinking, and fiction gives the book its lasting interest.
Very little biographical detail about Frances H. Clarke appears to be readily confirmed in the sources reviewed here, so the author remains somewhat elusive. Still, the novel has endured through library and digital editions, keeping this pseudonymous writer in view for readers interested in early speculative and utopian literature.