Merriman, Effie W
Entry updated 4 November 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1857-1937) US author of several books under her own name, and circa 1898 editor of the magazine The Housekeeper; she also wrote under her married name Mrs James Fifield. A Queer Dilemma and Other Stories (coll 1898) is of sf interest as a collection of Fantastika that includes the title story's astral travel leading to unwelcome Identity Exchange; a Sleeper Awakes revival from a century of Hypnotic trance in "A Twentieth Century Romance", whose 1992 is a world of sexual role-reversal where women are tall and dominant, men small and dainty, and public consumption of food (now minimalist; see Food Pills) is considered offensive; further sf social comedy in "The Tax on Bachelors", where the future society of 1932 imposes said tax "to break up the unmarried condition which forced so many women to compete with men in the labor market" (see Feminism); another Sleeper Awakes revival after long, mystically imposed Suspended Animation running from 1837 to 1963 in "A Scientific Courtship", in whose twentieth-century future marital harmony is ensured by astrological compatibility; and Communication via psychic "automatic writing" in "Mr Dillingham's Correspondent".
As Mrs James Fifield, this author also published Rejuvenated (1928), in which a seventy-year old man through a process of Rejuvenation becomes thirty again, to comic effect. [DRL/JC]
Effie Woodward Fifield [née Merriman]
born Hyde Park, Minnesota: 17 February 1857
died 1937
works
- A Queer Dilemma and Other Stories (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Franklin Taylor Pub Co, 1898) [coll: hb/uncredited]
- Rejuvenated (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Midwest Company, 1928) [hb/nonpictorial]
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