With the republication since 1985 of several of her novels, Katharine Burdekin has emerged, in the words of Gary K. Wolfe, as "the leading feminist utopian writer of her era, as well as one of the most thoughtful and provocative sf [science-fiction] writers of the 1930s." In both her published and unpublished work Burdekin favored speculative fiction and fantasy, forms that allowed her the narrative strategies for elaborating critiques of her own society and exploring alternatives to it.

From the early 1930s until the mid 1980s Burdekin's identity as the author of the highly praised speculative fiction Proud Man (1934) and the remarkable dystopian novel Swastika Night (1937) was concealed from public view. Beginning in 1934, she published her work under the male pseudonym "Murray Constantine," evidently fearful that her decision to write against Adolf Hitler's Nazism--the most threatening political ideology of her time--would endanger her two young daughters in the event...