Mary E. Bradley Lane was an American writer whose life, including her birth and death dates, is poorly documented; later readers know her mainly through a single work. In 1890 she published the utopian novel Mizora: A Prophecy. Set in an imagined utopian society, the book envisions an ideal nation composed of women, with highly advanced science and social organization, and uses this setting to explore issues such as women's education, scientific progress, and social institutions, bearing a distinct early feminist utopian character. As a relatively rare work by a woman writer within late nineteenth-century American utopian literature, Mizora holds a place in the feminist science fiction and utopian traditions and has drawn renewed scholarly attention in recent years.
