Dr Nicola Wilson starts new chapter for forgotten writer
Wednesday, 07 December 2011
Photograph taken from the front cover of the reprinted edition of 'This Slavery'
'This book is an extremely rare example of a novel written by a working-class woman.'
The life and works of a long-forgotten Lancashire mill girl turned radical writer are to be introduced to a new generation of readers thanks to the reprinting of her most famous book, This Slavery, by Dr Nicola Wilson, from the Department of English Language and Literature.
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was a working-class writer and socialist activist who campaigned for social and economic justice and the rights of working women. A poet, journalist, children's writer, and novelist, she worked in the Lancashire cotton mills from the age of eleven until her early twenties.
She is believed to be the first working-class woman in Britain to publish a novel - her first was Miss Nobody in 1913.
She wrote a further nine novels, but following her death in 1962 she has been lost from the literary horizon. Dr Wilson has been instrumental in the reprinting of This Slavery, and has written the introduction to the new edition.
She has long been fascinated and inspired by the life and work of Ethel and conducts research on the history of the novel and working-class writing. Dr Wilson said: "This is the first reprint of this important feminist and socialist novel, which offers a radical take on the classic mill-girl story.
"It is an extremely rare example of a novel written by a working-class woman. Other working-class women had written and published poetry and short stories but the challenges of sitting down to write a full-length novel as a working woman with family were huge."
This Slavery, which was originally printed in 1925, combines romance and melodrama with a tale of industrial conflict, and also indicates the necessity of seeing the world politically and acting to secure change. Ethel fought to remove the daily grind experienced by all workers, but particularly women.
In an article for The Woman Worker she described the factory worker as ‘practically a beggar and a slave', declaring all workers ‘dependent on the whims of a master class'. The grind of domestic work, often combined with factory labour, also attracted her attention; she urged women to ‘go out and play' and be ‘something more than a dish washer'.
The new edition is printed by Trent Editions as part of its Radical Fictions series on 8 December. It was typeset and designed by Callum Lewis and Rebecca Kirby, two undergraduate students in the Department of Typography and Graphic Design as part of their BA course.