Ethel Carnie Holdsworth series – serie

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.

In this, her bestselling second novel, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth adapts a formula popularised by the Bronte sisters to write a tale of dark and gothic romance set in the Lancashire hills. First published anonymously in 1917 amid the tumult of World War I, the novel quickly achieved strong sales in Britain and the US. By 1920 the author was working with Cecil Hepworth, a lauded pioneer of silent cinema, on the film version. In her fascinating introduction to the novel, Pamela Fox analyses Carnie Holdsworth's popular and political writings and discusses how in Helen of Four Gates, Carnie Holdsworth makes a powerful and important contribution both to early cinema and to working-class writing as a whole.

It is not for nothing that Belinda's father called her "The General". Belinda could marshal and control more than armies-she could control the people about her. Belinda's father dies and she is left with an ailing mother to support. But nothing daunted, she sells up their beloved home and sets out on her long Odyssey of domestic service.There surely never was a domestic servant like Belinda. Staving off irate butchers when there is no money to pay them, helping elopements, protecting down-trodden wives, become every-day occurrences in Belinda's life, through which her extreme good-nature and sense of humour carry her in triumph.