SWASTIKA NIGHT

First 'Left Book Club' edition. Publisher's original red paper-covered boards with black titles to the spine and upper board. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the paper a little worn at the corners and tips of the slightly faded spine. The contents, with toning to the cheap paper stock and some spotting to the closed text-block edge, are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps.

An early reissue of this scarce pseudonymous novel by Katharine Burdekin, an important author of feminist and dystopian fiction who fell into literary obscurity for over forty years until she was rediscovered in the 1980s by the scholar and critic Daphne Patai. One of the most original of the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s, Swastika Night bears striking similarities to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. While Orwell's dystopia is embedded in our culture, Burdekin's equally powerful novel, written more than a decade earlier and exploring parallel themes, was almost completely unknown until being reissued by The Feminist Press in 1985. First published in 1937, this 1940 reissue for the 'Left Book Club' includes a publisher's note contextualising the novel and reaffirming the author's views following the start of World War II.