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What happens when you leave everything you know behind? Your husband, your child, your identity - even your own world?
After clashing with the political leanings of the Czarist regime, Vera Zarovitch is exiled to Siberia. She drifts for a while, travelling through the wilderness and interacting with various communities before reaching the Arctic.
Faced with the decision to survive in the cold or keep moving, Vera takes a small boat out onto the sea in an attempt to escape, but her boat is mysteriously swallowed, spiralling down into the water and deep below. She emerges not into heaven or hell, but something in-between - Mizora, a hidden, all-female society existent in the innermost underground corners of the earth.
Stranded with little way back, Vera embarks on an unforeseen adventure in morality, biology, science and emotivity spanning almost two decades. The community is like nothing seen above; their language is strange, their chemical experiments advanced and their families lack any sign of the male species.
Torn between what she knows and what she wants to know, Vera must decide - does she assimilate into this odd new land or does she bring her knew-found knowledge back to the surface?
The good, the just, the noble, close heart and eyes to the sweet allurements of domestic life, lest posterity suffer physically or mentally by them. But the criminal has no restraints but what the law enforces. Ignorance, poverty and disease, huddled in dens of wretchedness, where they multiply with reckless improvidence, sometimes fostered by mistaken charity.The future of the world, if it be grand and noble, will be the result of Universal Education, free as the God-given water we drink.In the United States I await the issue of universal liberty. In this refuge for oppression, my husband found a grave. Childless, homeless and friendless, in poverty and obscurity, I have written the story of my wanderings. The world's fame can never warm a heart already dead to happiness; but out of the agony of one human life, may come a lesson for many. Life is a tragedy even under the most favorable conditions.
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In 2022 we will once more be looking for publishing students and interns to work on our growing series of out-of-print gems. Find out more at Gothic World Literature Editions.