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The House That Jill Built
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| Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. With an Introduction by
Jenny Harper, Fiona Kay Hornby, Tess McMahon, Barbara Sanders, and Janet Swan
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| ISBN 9781849212182 |
| Paperback 236 pages |
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| Published 17 June 2022
UK Price £17.95
US Price $24.95 |
Former "mill girl", Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, wrote this book with a clear mission: believing that in reading stories about working people doing what they could to change things, hearts and minds could be turned towards a better society.
In 1910 Ethel Carnie (as she was then) said that the most difficult task "is to teach people to want something better, to sting them into rebellion against poverty, to fire their hearts with a cause".
As a passionate reader and regular library user, she knew of the demand for, and influence of, popular fiction and saw this as the way to achieve her dream of a fairer and more equitable world.
First published in 1920, this is a story of a young woman of "grit, grace and gumption" attempting to do good.
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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© Kennedy & Boyd, an imprint of Zeticula Ltd., Unit 13, 196 Rose Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AT, Scotland
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