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Collected Original Fairy Tales
This first collected edition of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's fairy tales contributes significantly to both our knowledge of her work and the history of the fairy tale as a genre. As a working-class woman writer, her stories represent work, class, and gender in ways that are startlingly different to what is found in many well-known fairy tales. Speaking out of the experiences of her class and gender, her tales imagine magical worlds and heroes and heroines whose goals move far beyond the individualist success found in traditional fairy tales.
This Slavery
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's 1925 novel, This Slavery, is a radical feminist and socialist tale of love, loss, poverty and politics. The action follows two sisters, mill-girls Hester and Rachel Martin, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when a fire at the mill leaves them unemployed. As the material poverty of their home-life deepens and the girls are forced to confront the difficulties of their economic circumstances, Hester and Rachel make romantic and political choices that will place them on opposite sides of the great class divide.
Collected Poems
"I think it no exaggeration to say that all my poems came into my head at the mill." Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, 1907.
Miss Nobody
None
The Taming of Nan
In 1919 Ethel Carnie Holdsworth published her third novel, The Taming of Nan. At this point in her career, Carnie Holdsworth was an established author with one notable success, Helen of Four Gates (1917), to her credit. As was typical of her, she did not try to replicate her recent success; instead, The Taming of Nan explored new territory, addressing the issues of fair compensation for a workplace injury and working-class domestic violence. In addition to addressing these societal problems, The Taming of Nan's central family grouping consists of three original characters that reinterpret accepted working-class tropes: Nan Cherry, a working-class virago; her husband Bill, a stolid family man; and their daughter, Polly, a teenaged mill girl who wants nothing more than to have a good time. These characters develop in a context of intergenerational family ties as well as a widespread community whose advice and traditions provide a fertile context for their family drama.
The House That Jill Built
First published in 1920, this a story of a young woman of "grit, grace and gumption" attempting to do good.
General Belinda
The third novel to be brought back into print in The Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series, edited by Dr Nicola Wilson, a collection and study of the author's writings that explores her contribution to British working-class literature. The novel, first published in 1924, is Introduced by Roger Smalley.
Equality Island
It is not enough to say that Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was a radical, and her novels express that. There is a broader narrative to her writing that relates to the development of her politics, her reaction to domestic and world events, and contemporary political thinking in socialist circles. Equality Island is a case in point. It was serialised in The Daily Herald at a time when Ethel was concerned about fascism gaining traction in Britain and the erosion of political rights in communist Russia. These were new causes for her, more than twenty years into a writing career and a life of political campaigning which were intimately intertwined. That she found a way to conduct these two life-long quests is remarkable. It flew in the face of what was expected of someone from her class, her sex, indeed of someone from East Lancashire. But that can be said to be the essence of Ethel. She was a confirmed pacifist, yet from a young age declared war on society's expectations of her.
