[Gutenberg 58082] • The Adventures of an Ugly Girl

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846-1930), who published as Mrs George Corbett, was an English feminist writer who worked as a journalist for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle and was also a popular writer of adventure and society novels, many of which were written as magazine serials and not published in book form. She is best known for her feminist utopian novel New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889) which was written in response to Mrs Humphry Ward's open letter 'An Appeal Against Female Suffrage' published in The Nineteenth Century magazine and signed by over a hundred women against the extension of parliamentary suffrage to women. While New Amazonia was the most explicitly feminist of her novels, it was not the only one to deal with the position of women in society. She was also one of the first authors to feature female detectives in fiction. This novel was first published in 1898.