After eulogising about the library reserve at Grangemouth I've been using another great repository of knowledge, Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg aims to create digital copies of public domain books (at least by the US definition). It's a great source for old Victorian literature as well as a useful tool if you want to look up a particular quotation but can't be bothered to read through a whole book.
There are also some real gems on there. One of them is Flatland. Whilst science fiction is often used for biting social comment and satirical whimsy, mathematics is usually pretty dry. However, Flatland is an exception and pokes fun at the British class system by introducing us to the 2 dimensional Flatland in which different social classes are represented as geometric shapes. The more sides a shape has, the higher up the social order it is. Interestingly women are presented as simple lines and are repressed by the rest of Flatland's social order.
The book was written in 1884 so does that make it an early example of feminist literature?
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