ABSTRACT
Women writers increasingly foresee the destruction of the cities, with groups of survivors living in the ruins, scavenging the left-overs. The society in Forbes’s ‘London fields’ does indeed perpetuate itself by parthogenesis; it is a gift of nature but a rarity in British women’s utopias. The complete identification of women with nature continues to be a dystopian fear, rather than a eutopian dream. In Adamand Eve and Newbury Bennett also writes antiutopian satire. This is a lighter-hearted Orwell, with an escape hatch. Set in 1984, in a bureaucratic, conformist, computerised Britain the system can be subverted by those with intelligence and initiative. Fairbairns depicts the possible future role of women, excluded fromany participation in culture, reduced to the status of breeders. The cover of Benefits cites Fay Weldon’s description of the author as ‘a female H. G. Well’s, but Orwell was clearly a reference for Fairbairns, as her structural framework indicates.
