Gale, Zona
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1874-1938) US journalist and author, an early feminist whose Romance Island (1906), the first of her many books, is a Lost Race tale set on an Island called Yaque somewhere "in the eastern sea" – its inhabitants have displaced it partially into the fourth Dimension – where the father of the protagonist's beloved, after being shipwrecked near it, has been proclaimed king according to a complex protocol. The Phoenician race, which has inhabited the Isle of Yaque for two millennia, is by 1906 far advanced over the rest of the world in science, including Gravity control, and technology, including advanced submarines, and in wisdom; experiments in the control of nuclear energy are also afoot. The island, which hides its radiant City behind inaccessible cliffs, is a lovingly described Pocket Universe. In the end, the young folk leave, but – almost without precedent in the Lost Race tale – no Disaster then destroys the hidden world. Only, as they board their ship, "the dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, [receives] the island." Friendship Village (coll 1908), the first of the Friendship Village volumes, presents the eponymous Wisconsin town as a nostalgic Utopia which honours Feminist concerns; later volumes were disillusioned. [JC]
Zona Gale
born Portage, Wisconsin: 26 August 1874
died Chicago, Illinois: 27 December 1938
works
- Romance Island (Indianapolis, Indiana: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1906) [illus/hb/Hermann C Wall]
- Friendship Village (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1908) [coll: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry