The Working Class Movement Library hosted an event on September 7th 2013 to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's Miss Nobody. Carnie Holdsworth's novel has recently been republished as part of a new series of her works by Kennedy and Boyd edited by Nicola Wilson and with an introduction by Belinda Webb.
Nicola Wilson of the University of Reading introduced the novel, describing the barriers faced by readers and students in engaging with work by working-class writers. As Wilson pointed out, many students graduating with English Literature degrees are likely to complete their studies without having read any work by working-class authors, and even less likely to have come across working-class women writers. This is, of course, damaging, and contributes to a distorted image of the cultural lives of working people. The practical difficulties of changing this situation, however, are not inconsiderable. Many texts have been lost altogether, or otherwise exist only in specialist archives (Chris Hopkins has produced a case study on teaching out of print novels that offers some ways through these problems for academics). Then there is the fact that when these texts are republished they are often on the expensive side, which is discouraging for students and general readers. Cuts to public libraries restrict access further. Then there are a series of questions about literary value: a critical dismissal of the genres and modes - romance, thriller, melodrama - often employed by working-class writers, which often results in a tendency to regard their work as interesting from the perspective of social and cultural history, but of little value to literary scholars. At the root of that is, among other attitudes, an assumption that working-class writers are basically uncreative in the forms they use, and unreflectively reproduce the conventions and codes of popular fictions.
The republication of Carnie Holdsworth's novels will, it is hoped, intervene in this conspiracy of factors that work to marginalise working-class writers.
Born into a radical weaving family in Oswaldtwistle in 1886, she wrote at least ten novels, together with a startling volume of journalism, children's stories and poetry, beginning to write while working in the mills in Great Harwood, Lancashire.
Belinda Webb's introduction to the new edition of Miss Nobody identifies three literary traditions that feed into the novel: the 'New Woman' novel, the Chartist novel, and the romance. She combined elements of these forms with a language rooted in working-class experience to bring into the remit of the novel the lives of working women.
The novel appeared in the year of Emily Wilding Davidson’s death at the Derby, and while Carnie Holdsworth seems to have had connections with the Pankhursts, her work insists on the distinctive nature of oppression faced by working-class women, an emphasis that was not typical of the middle-class dominated Suffragette movement.
A video of extracts of the novel read by the actor Keeley Forsyth gave attendees a sense of the humour and grit of Carnie Holdsworth’s writing.
This was followed by three short films by Nick Wilding, a film-maker who has worked to track down and show the 1920 film adaption of Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates, shot near Hebden Bridge. Nick showed a film tracing Carnie Holdsworth's steps around Great Harwood and the surrounding moors that provided an atmospheric glimpse of the landscape in which she wrote. Nick also showed a film of Dorothy Sutcliffe, who herself worked in the mills in the area, reading Carnie Holdsworth’s poem ‘The Bookworm’. Nick concluded with a film shot in the Working Class Movement Library, in which Nick and Rae Street discussed the comparable lives of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and Enid Stacey.
After a break to view to Library’s holdings of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s work, including a very rare copy of The Clear Light, the anti-fascist journal she established in the 1920s with her husband, Kathleen Bell of De Montfort University gave a keynote lecture.
Bell argued that examining the reading and writing lives of working-class people helps us to think about what literature is for. Drawing on her research into working-class women writers from the eighteenth century onwards, she noted that it is common in their work to find an idea of literature as a kind of alternative wealth, the ‘treasure house of the intellect’. This is the central concern in Carnie Holdsworth's ‘The Bookworm’, which imagines the reading experience, the entry into ‘the world of books’, as a way of ‘owning the world.’ This is often attended by anger at the way those with unfettered access to knowledge hoard and squander it. Economic and social conditions affect the reading and the writing experience for working-class people, and especially the lack of leisure time in which to read and write - Carnie Holdsworth described struggling to read two pages in six hours.
Bell argued that this experience of time affected both the choice of reading matter and the writing practices of the working class. The need for concentration of effect and strength of plot were identified as primary concerns. Working-class writers were affected by the economics of publishing that meant other working people could not always afford to read their work, depriving them of an audience, but also by prevalent myths of artistic production, such as the romantic image of the struggling and starving artist.
The event was rounded off by a recital of two of Ethel’s poems, ‘Possession’ and ‘On the Road’, set to music by Ethel Smyth in 1913, by Emma Walton and Stuart Overington of the Royal Northern College of Music.
There is of course a long way to go before the reading and writing experiences of working people are treated as other than marginal and peripheral concerns.
Discussing the politics of literary recovery, Raymond Williams pointed out that academic and critical attention alone was not enough: ‘Significant recovery begins when at least some of the novels are put into active circulation again, for the readers and the children and successors of the readers among whom and sometimes for whom they were written.’
Having Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's novels in circulation once more, available for those who shared, or whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents shared, the life she lived and wrote about is surely a major achievement in this struggle.
Elinor Taylor 2013
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