THE SPINSTER AND THE PROPHET FLORENCE DEEKS, H.G. WELLS, AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PURLOINED PAST.(Review)

THE SPINSTER AND THE PROPHET FLORENCE DEEKS, H.G. WELLS, AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PURLOINED PAST: A.B. MCKILLOP MACFARLANE, WALTER AND ROSS, 2000

You can be forgiven, if, as a Canadian feminist, you have never heard of Florence Deeks. Until the publication of The Spinster and the Prophet, she was pretty much relegated to a couple of obscure footnotes in a few biographies of the famous British author and theorist H.G. Wells.

In 1914, without ever having published a word, Deeks undertook to write a history of the world, from the beginning of the solar system to the First World War. For four years she conducted meticulous, if amateur, research and constructed a …