A forgotten feminist dystopian novel, a story of eugenics and newspaper manipulation that is believed to have influenced Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, is coming back into print for the first time in a century, complete with pages that were suppressed in 1918.

Rose Macaulay’s What Not was first published 100 years ago, but swiftly withdrawn over potentially libellous passages. Once it was reissued in 1919, it had “lost its momentum” and has been out of print ever since, according to independent publisher Handheld Press, which will republish the novel in March 2019.

Set after the first world war, “when the tumult and the shouting had died”, What Not takes place in a Britain where the Mental Progress Act has forced the population to be tested and graded, from A to C. In order to prevent the birth of stupid children, lower-rated people are not allowed to marry within their category. If they do, and reproduce, they incur such punitive taxes that many babies are abandoned, and are then dealt with by the Ministry of Brains. Kitty Grammont, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Brains who is certified as an A for breeding purposes, and the politically ambitious Nicholas Chester, who is uncertified, are in love – but Chester’s lack of classification means they cannot marry.

Handheld Press called the novel “a lost classic of feminist protest at social engineering, and rage at media manipulation”, saying that Aldous Huxley’s utopian classic Brave New World, published 14 years later, “borrowed many of Macaulay’s ideas for Huxley’s own prophetic vision”.

In her introduction, Sarah Lonsdale, senior lecturer in journalism at City, University of London, admits that there is no record of Huxley reading What Not, but says the themes of the later novel bear uncanny resemblances to Macaulay’s. A possible connection between the two could be found in Naomi Royde-Smith, editor of the Saturday Westminster: both Huxley and Macaulay were close friends of hers, with Huxley staying with Royde-Smith in Knightsbridge for several months in 1923. At that time, Macaulay was also a regular in Royde-Smith’s home, particularly as a co-host of her Thursday evening literary soirees, writes Lonsdale, making it possible Huxley either read What Not, or at least discussed its contents with Macaulay.

Huxley’s Alpha Double plus to Epsilon Minus caste system appears to have sprung straight from Macaulay’s grading system Sarah Lonsdale

“Huxley’s Alpha Double plus to Epsilon Minus caste system appears to have sprung straight from Macaulay’s A to C3 grading system,” argues Lonsdale. “Huxley’s brainwashing techniques … again appear to have been derived directly from the Mind Training programmes that all citizens in the Britain of What Not are forced to undergo.”

There are also echoes of What Not in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Lonsdale argues that “the offices of the Ministry of Brains, inhabited by slogan-producing, rubber-stamping, letter-writing civil servants, could also be those in Orwell’s teaming Ministry of Truth”.

It is not the first time Macaulay, the author of 23 novels including The Towers of Trebizond, has been claimed to have influenced a male writer with no credit. In her 2003 biography of Macaulay, Sarah LeFanu details how, as a young woman, Macaulay befriended her father’s pupil, the poet Rupert Brooke. In 1911, she published a novel that includes a tortured man recalling his country childhood as a sanctuary filled with bees and honey. “And will there be honey for tea?” he asks. In 1912, Brooke wrote The Sentimental Exile, which includes the famous line: “And is there honey still for tea?”

What Not is barely mentioned in biographical writing about Macaulay, said Kate Macdonald at Handheld, “probably because it wasn’t much noticed at the time, due to its withdrawal and lack of advertising on its reissue. The plot’s themes and subject matter were also challenging, not anything like as accessible … as they are now.”

Rose Macaulay, pictured in 1924. Photograph: Sasha/Getty Images

Macdonald set up Handheld to bring forgotten fiction back into print, and has already published work including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s final collection of short stories Kingdoms of Elfin, and Edwardian speculative political thriller What Might Have Been, by Ernest Bramah. What Not was the “top title” on her list to republish, but she found it difficult to find a copy of the book with the excised passages, which deal with a tabloid editor’s attempt to blackmail the Minister of Brains, and were cut for fear of a libel suit from a newspaper editor at the time.

Michael Sadleir, the director of Macaulay’s publisher Constable, felt nervous about a newspaper editor being at ease with blackmailing, said Macdonald: “Macaulay was becoming a notable satirist and snoot-cocker at this time, and she paid close attention to journalistic politics in her own day. So the first edition was withdrawn pretty sharply and she was instructed to write new text to replace the offending passages without making it necessary to make new plates for that section of the book. So she burbled inoffensively for a page or two, making it fairly obvious that she was treading water.”

Cover art for the Handheld reissue

A copy of the first edition was eventually found in the library of author and science fiction expert John Clute, whose copy had been formerly owned by Sadleir.

“I’m including the material in this new edition because that’s what Macaulay intended, it restores the integrity of her original novel,” Macdonald said.

Lonsdale calls What Not an unfairly overlooked text, particularly in the context of dystopian fiction. “Her ideas were spectacularly prescient and important, and, as we have seen, they laid the groundwork for the two 20th-century novels about the future of the human race that are celebrated as the most visionary and thought-provoking ever written,” she writes. “To be sure, it is a difficult, and sometimes slippery book to grasp hold of, but it will certainly leave its mark long after you have turned the final page.”