Overview

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.

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9781849212427

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Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962) was a working-class writer and socialist activist who campaigned for social and economic justice and the rights of working-class men and women. A poet, journalist, writer for children, and novelist, she worked in the Lancashire cotton mills from the age of eleven until her early twenties. She left the mills through the patronage of the popular socialist author and Clarion leader, Robert Blatchford (1851-1943), and worked as a journalist in London and as a teacher at Bebel House Women's College and Socialist Education Centre, before returning back North to her roots. She had two daughters and edited the Clear Light, the organ of the National Union for Combating Fascism, with her husband from their home in the 1920s. She wrote at least ten novels, making her a rare example of a female working-class novelist.

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