Ertz, Susan
Entry updated 25 November 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1887-1985) UK author of popular novels, very probably pseudonymous, active for much of the century and perhaps now most famous for one quote from her novel Anger in the Sky (1943): "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Her Scientific Romance, Woman Alive (1935), borrows wholesale from John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain (1932), which is shaped by J W Dunne's vision of the nature of Time. A fatally ill central European philosopher-mystic, putting Dunne to the test, successfully facilitates the beaming of the protagonist's consciousness into his own aged body in a distant Near Future 1985, where a gas-carried Pandemic, created as a Weapon in the course of something like World War Three, proves fatal to all women; only one female survives, due to her ingestion of a unique Drug. The protagonist observes Stella's resolute fight to control her fertility (see Feminism), and her vigorous contempt for men (for they are incapable of living without War and imposed Sex), though she does in the end find someone to marry (see Adam and Eve). The species may be saved. [JC/KM]
Susan Ertz
born Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: 13 February 1887 [1894 often wrongly given]
died Kent, England: 11 April 1985
works
- Woman Alive (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935) [illus/hb/Bip Pares]
links
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