Rokeya Hossein (1880-1932) was a reformer who, after she was widowed, started a girl’s school in Calcutta. She wrote a satiric fantasy in English called Sultana’s Dream (1905) which shows a topsy- turvy world in which women take the place of men. Her novel Padmarag also showed the need for women to reform their condition by their own actions. Ghosh Jaya, a popular novelist, could only write because her husband protected her. The medium of the novel made room for the experiences of communities that had not received much space in the literary scene earlier.
