Martha Cabanne Kayser

{{Short description|American utopian novelist}}

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Martha Mitchell Cabanne Kayser Brown (September 27, 1872 – May 14, 1966) was an American utopian novelist.

Martha Mitchell Cabanne was the daughter of St. Louis businessman Joseph Charles Cabanne and Susan Martha Preston Christy Mitchell.{{Cite book |last1=Emerson |first1=Wilimena Hannah Eliot |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LysYAAAAMAAJ |title=Genealogy of the Descendants of John Eliot, "apostle to the Indians," 1598-1905 |last2=Eliot |first2=Ellsworth |last3=Eliot |first3=George Edwin |date=1905 |publisher=Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press |language=en}} She married Robert Lee Kayser in 1893.St. Louis Post-Dispatch Wed, Dec 20, 1893 ·Page 6

Her first novel was The Aerial Flight to the Realm of Peace (1922), where two characters take a balloon flight to another planet. They discover a peaceful, egalitarian utopia and vow to never return to Earth.{{Cite book |last=Carter |first=Susanne |url=http://archive.org/details/warpeacethroughw0000cart |title=War and peace through women's eyes : a selective bibliography of twentieth-century American women's fiction |date=1992 |publisher=New York : Greenwood Press |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-313-27771-9}} Her second was Faith (1931), later republished as Heaven is Here (1938).{{Cite web |title=SFE: Kayser, Martha |url=https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/kayser_martha |access-date=2024-07-10 |website=sf-encyclopedia.com}} She adapted it for the stage as The Way, which premiered at the Cherry Lane Theatre on October 11, 1940. Faith Morton (played by Eve Casanova) is the headmistress of a Naples school who campaigns for world peace through her students, sheer willpower, and positive thinking. The play was poorly received; by the second act the audience "began to participate vocally in the proceedings."{{Cite book |last=Leiter |first=Samuel L. |url=http://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofne0000leit_y4q7 |title=The encyclopedia of the New York stage, 1940-1950 |date=1992 |publisher=New York : Greenwood Press |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-313-27510-4}}

Martha Kayser died on May 14, 1966 in Long Beach, California.Independent, Mon, May 16, 1966 ·Page 33