Editing Flatland (section)

==Critical reception==
''Flatland'' did not have much success when published, although it was not entirely ignored.<ref name="Flatland Reviews">{{cite web |url=http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/abbott/Flatland/Reviews/index.shtml |title=Flatland Reviews |access-date=2 April 2011}}</ref>  In the entry on Edwin Abbott in the ''[[Dictionary of National Biography]]'' for persons who died in the period of 1922 to 1930, ''Flatland'' was not even mentioned.<ref name="isbn0-465-01123-3 1">{{cite book |author=Stewart, Ian |title=The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |publisher=Basic Books |location=New York |year=2008 |pages= xiii |isbn=978-0-465-01123-0 }}</ref>

The book was discovered again after [[Albert Einstein]]'s [[General relativity|general theory of relativity]] was published, which brought to prominence the concept of a fourth dimension. ''Flatland'' was mentioned in a letter by William Garnett entitled "Euclid, Newton and Einstein" published in ''[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]'' on 12 February 1920. In this letter, Abbott is depicted, in a sense, as a prophet due to his intuition of the importance of ''time'' to explain certain phenomena:<ref name="isbn0-465-01123-3 4">{{cite book |author=Stewart, Ian |title=The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |url=https://archive.org/details/annotatedflatlan00stew |url-access=limited |publisher=Basic Books |location=New York |year=2008 |pages= [https://archive.org/details/annotatedflatlan00stew/page/n41 11]|isbn=978-0-465-01123-0 }}</ref><ref name="urlFlatland Reviews">{{cite web |url=http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/abbott/Flatland/Reviews/1920nature.shtml |title=Flatland Reviews – Nature, February 1920 |access-date=2 April 2011}}</ref>

{{quote|Some thirty or more years ago a little ''[[wiktionary:jeu d'esprit|jeu d'esprit]]'' was written by Dr. Edwin Abbott entitled ''Flatland''. At the time of its publication it did not attract as much attention as it deserved... If there is motion of our three-dimensional space relative to the fourth dimension, all the changes we experience and assign to the flow of time will be due simply to this movement, the whole of the future as well as the past always existing in the fourth dimension.}}

The ''[[Dictionary_of_National_Biography#Oxford_Dictionary_of_National_Biography|Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]]'' subsequently revised his biography to state that [Abbott] "is most remembered as the author of ''Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions''{{-"}}.