When a plague wipes out most of the world’s male population and civilization crumbles, women struggle to build an agrarian community in the English countryside.

Imagine a plague that brings society to a standstill by killing off most of the men on Earth. The few men who survive descend into lechery and atavism. Meanwhile, a group of women (accompanied by one virtuous male survivor) leave the wreckage of London to start fresh, establishing a communally run agrarian outpost. But their sexist society hasn’t permitted most of them to learn any useful skills-will the commune survive their first winter? This is the bleak world imagined in 1913 by English writer J. D. Beresford-one that has particular resonance for the planet’s residents in the 2020s. This edition of A World of Women offers twenty-first century readers a new look at a neglected classic.

Beresford introduces us to the solidly bourgeois, prim and proper Gosling family. As once-bustling London shuts down-Parliament closes, factories grind to a halt, nature reclaims stone and steel-the paterfamilias Mr. Gosling adopts a life of libertinism while his daughters in the countryside struggle to achieve a radically transformed and improved egalitarian and feminist future.