Thousands of years in the future, the division between the sexes is entrenched, turning to warfare. Many technologies are lost and much history forgotten, but gynogenesis (by which two women may have a child) is becoming the scientific foundation for the Empire of Her Majesty, Berenice I. Amidst the haunted marshes of outlying Essex, the routine and romance of homes and offices in the Surrey heartland, and the crumbling feudal heritage of Lundin town, the action unfolds like the panorama from a stagecoach window.
Jane is a sixteen-year-old civil servant under Her Majesty. Sent to audit the spoils of battle, she falls for Captain Modesty Clay, precipitating a maelstrom of events that force her to grow up fast, and in which she catches the eye of the Empress herself.
The first novel in the Warriors of Love series, a projected twelve volumes of intertwined stories told by three female narrators, Jane is a beguiling evocation of a memory-haunted future, combining erotic picaresque, breathless narrative in the best tradition of British adventure yarns, and poetic delineament of place and person.
It is a novel of free floating imagination, it unvails the world that is for us politically challenging, if not unacceptable – the female only future. It unravels it through the eyes of a teenage girl. It is hard to imagine the world with just women, and the book does not portray it as a perfect or “to look forward to“.It is what it is, and for Jane it‘s the only reality she knows. Apart from original style, a perfectionist unvailing of the character of Jane through her narration (she comes to life through her notes as a very real and a very specific person) the book shines a new light on women. It would be interesting to know when this book has been written, in relation to which era of the developpement of feminism.
Through imagination ‚Jane‘ brings to life equality between women and men. It does it in a positive way, through a beautiful image of female capacity and humanity and through eyes of a lusty and a bit punkish though maticulus in her reports teenager. It is a journey to the female world, more real than what I have experienced in many other cultural creations. It is a complex image of women living with women, and it is not a fantasy of a man. It is truely inspiring and eye opening read, and a journey I think we should all go through.
This novel has swagger. Post-apocalyptic fantasy exploring a hyper-feminist society through the youth and eroticism of beaucrat Jane. P.F.Jeffery’s writing bounces with intelligence, charisma, and humor (an absolute pleasure to read)- but still finds the time to critically analyze itself, and feminity, and sex, and love, in a very gentle and confident way.