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These essays treat common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds. The range of subjects reaches from Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century Blazing World of the North Pole, to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery; and from the 18th- and 19th-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, to science fiction pulps; finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy and Mitchison. This collection aims to show that these fictions relate to one another historically, and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a "better place".