ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Katharine Burdekin's speculative works—two rarely mentioned 1920s novels, The Burning Ring and The Rebel Passion, as well as the somewhat better attended to Proud Man, published in 1934 under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine—to examine their discontent with the present moment. It argues that Burdekin uses time travel as a device to narrate a series of queer bildungsromane, that is, to enable journeys of sexual discovery and understanding for her characters. In The Burning Ring, Carling is an artist who adamantly refuses to consider the possibility of marriage and family. He is in fact rather misanthropic, indifferent to those around him and isolated from mainstream society, and although age 43, his emotional life is said to have frozen at thirteen, the age at which we later find out his mother died. The narrator of The Rebel Passion, the monk Giraldus, is also a man with an empty or meaningless present.
