Contains 11 original essays on works on utopian and science fiction by women that reveal a literary tradition from 17th-century Europe to the present day. This collection speaks to different themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the men-less islands of the French writer Scudery to the 18th- and 19th-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of L. Guin, Wittig, Piercy and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.