Helen of Four Gates

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, and worked as a journalist in London and as a teacher at Bebel House Women's College and Socialist Education Centre, before returning 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.Pamela Fox is Professor of English at Georgetown University specialising in working-class literature and culture as well as feminist and cultural theory. She is the author of 'Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945' (1994) and 'Natural Acts: Gender, Race, And Rusticity in Country Music' (2009). She is also co-editor of 'Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music', with Barbara Ching (2008).Nicola Wilson is a lecturer in the English Literature department at the University of Reading. She is the author of 'Home in British Working-Class Fiction' (2015) and has published on working-class writing in 'Key Words; The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 7' (2015) and 'A History of British Working Class Literature' (2016). In 2011 she introduced and edited Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's 1925 novel, 'This Slavery' (Trent), and is Series Editor of The Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series.