As a scholar of early-twentieth-century literature, I have not found it necessary to address contemporary political issues in my work. However, the election of Donald Trump has forced me to change my thoughts about writing in general and more specifically, about publishing on modernist women writers. In the present academic climate, many who read and teach in the perpetually unpopular field of women writers also contend with heavy teaching loads, difficult family commitments and/or precarious employment.

“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. [1] As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia. [2] Instead, many early readers chose to read it as the very opposite, as an anti-utopia or dystopia—a form centrally defined by its negative reaction against any attempt at realizing or imagining a utopia. Identifying...