This marvelous book is the sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved.
A time-traveler, Julian West, a young Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in the late 19th century, and awakens in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia. In conversations with the doctor who awakened him, he discovers a brilliantly realized vision of an ideal future, one that seemed unthinkable in his own century. Crime, war, personal animosity, and want are nonexistent. Equality of the sexes is a fact of life. In short, a messianic state of brotherly love is in effect.
A young, beautiful woman with a shiny future ahead of her falls seriously ill. It takes her a long time to recover, and when she does, the illness has taken such a toll on her physically and mentally that she is hardly the same person any more. Her beauty is gone, her colours are faded, and all she wants now is to remember her past self with the happiness of her former life.