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Shareby Kerry Howley
Bookforum (June 2010)
“It may sound like a small thing to acknowledge that women at the turn of the century differed in their visions of utopia, but the fierce individualism of the women Rowbotham profiles here is something most chroniclers would push aside for the sake of narrative simplicity. It’s this resistance to conventional storytelling that makes Dreamers so moving, the willingness to present a pastiche of quotations from pamphlets and letters and novels, to reveal the messy process of reinvention rather than merely reporting its conclusion. Instead of stern teleology, we get sporting play. When “new woman” Helena Born died in 1901, a friend wrote, “Hers was certainly the experimental life; there were no rut marks on her.”’
