Nicola Wilson – författare

Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered ’ex-mill girl novelist’ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.

I do not accept there is anything wrong with me.Days before her wedding Megan discovers she has a 50-50 chance of developing early onset Alzheimer's. Years later she's offered a genetic test. But if she's got the gene does she really want to know?Megan, 21. Megan, 47. Megan, 32. Megan, 27.One woman lurches through time while her young family deal with the consequences.I can't think. But I still feel. And most of the time I feel scared. Scared because it's too soon. I haven't finished yet.Plaques and Tangles by Nicola Wilson premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 2015.

Women's creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women's diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women's contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures. With an international, intergenerational set of contributors using diverse methodologies, essays explore women working in publishing transatlantically, on the continent, and beyond the Anglosphere. The book combines new work on high-profile women publishers and editors alongside analysis of women's work as translators, illustrators, booksellers, advertisers, patrons, and publisher's readers; complemented by new oral histories and interviews with leading women in publishing today. The first collection of its kind, the companion helps establish and shape a thriving new research field.

Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered ’ex-mill girl novelist’ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.

BeforeReese Witherspoon and Zoella's Book Clubs, there was Oprah Winfrey and Richardand Judy. And before them, there was Hugh Walpole and the Book Society. This isthe story of Britain's first celebrity book club and the judges who changed howwe read. For forty years between1929-1969, the Book Society chose from the best of world literature to mail outone book a month - fiction, history, travel, or biography - to subscribers in overthirty countries. The judges established what a good 'book club book' lookedlike: well-written, entertaining, informative; worth investing your time andmoney in, not too highbrow nor obscure. Making book-buying easier, they starteda revolution. And the legacy of their taste is still with us on bookshelvestoday. HughWalpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edmund Blunden werethe literary influencers of their day; household names whose personal lives,affairs, and politics informed their recommendations, mixing the personal andprofessional; social history with the domestic; love, disappointment, and war.They made global bestsellers with books that saw readers through Empire and thegrowth of fascism and antisemitism, the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War,and World War Two. Recommended!exploreshow a group of writers shook up the interwar book world, changing forever howwe buy and think about books.

A centenary edition of the 1913 novel, Miss Nobody, by Ethel Carnie (later Ethel Carnie Holdsworth), widely believed to be the first published novel written by a working-class woman in Britain. Miss Nobody charts the fortunes of the independent Carrie Brown, a former 'scullery drudge' turned oyster shop owner from Ardwick, Greater Manchester. Schooled in the popular romances of cheap yellow-backed novelettes, Carrie decides to sell up and leave the grey city of Manchester when she receives a surprising offer of marriage from a country farmer. The plot sees Carrie struggling to reconcile herself to the 'mixed up' reality of marriage and the loneliness of country life, and ultimately results in her striking out on her own. The story describes Carrie's picaresque adventures as she strives to find love and self-fulfilment in a harsh and oftentimes bitter world.

This book addresses the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches by combining both praxis and theory in a case study of a new international collaborative digital project, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP).