In Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted, Scottish-descended Australian traveller and narrator Hugh Victor Keith chances upon a lost colony of Scottish settlers located somewhere in the southwest of the United States or northern Mexico. Cut off from global developments for approximately 130 years, ‘Columba’ woefully lacks material evidence of progress, but Spence presents the fictional lost colony as a utopian space for the radical feminist transformation of marriage and the state. Her settlers have intermarried with an indigenous group and reinvented marriage to include a probationary period of ‘handfasting’ where couples live as if married for a year and a day before deciding whether they wish to confirm their relationships more permanently with marriage. In Spence's Columba, handfasting allows women equal rights because they are not stigmatized by a sexual double standard, ends prostitution because relationships are more fulfilling, and allows for a respectable position for the children of unmarried parents. The re-envisioning of family, moreover, transforms the state into an egalitarian structure invested in communal interests. It is understandable, then, that when Spence submitted the manuscript of Handfasted to The Sydney Mail in 1879 hoping to win a £100 prize, she was informed by the judge that her novel ‘was calculated to loosen the marriage tie – it was too socialistic, and consequently dangerous’. Spence's frank acknowledgement of pre-marital sex and her failure to criticize it no doubt was largely responsible for the manuscript's rejection and its consequent obscurity, which remained so until 1984 when the first and only edited version was published.