What Not: lost feminist novel that anticipated Brave New World finally finds its time

Rose Macaulay’s What Not, which features a sinister Ministry of Brains, is little known, but there are claims it influenced both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell

A forgotten feminist dystopian novel, a story of eugenics and newspaper manipulation that is believed to have influenced Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, is coming back into print for the first time in a century, complete with pages that were suppressed in 1918.

Rose Macaulay’s What Not was first published 100 years ago, but swiftly withdrawn over potentially libellous passages. Once it was reissued in 1919, it had “lost its momentum” and has been out of print ever since, according to independent publisher Handheld Press, which will republish the novel in March 2019.

Huxley’s Alpha Double plus to Epsilon Minus caste system appears to have sprung straight from Macaulay’s grading system

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