Book chapter
Working-class British Women Writers, 1840-1914: Resistance and Community
The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature, pp.169-186
Routledge literature companions, Routledge
2025
DOI: 10.4324/9781003226246-13
Abstract
The writings of several hundred 19th-century marginal or working-class women have survived, testifying to the wide variety of experiences and imaginations of their creators. This essay discusses rural and village poets Mary MacPherson, Jane Stevenson, and Janet Hamilton; factory poet Marie; and populist editor Eliza Cook, as well as autobiographer Janet Bathgate and oral narrator 'Elizabeth Dobbs' (Martha Grimes). In the 20th century, Ethel Carnie's working-class feminist poems and novels, including Miss Nobody (1913), portray lower-class women who model independence and solidarity.Some consistent themes appear in these writings across decades and genres: virtually all deal centrally with issues of rupture, displacement, and violence; note the special burdens of their fellow women's lives; offer solidarity with the less fortunate; and memorialize aspects of ordinary life unacknowledged by middle-class histories. Although most female 19th-century working-class writers offer social commentary, their allegiances become more directly political with increased access to education, the rise of the women's and labour movements, and the diminution of religion's traditional role as exclusive moral arbiter. Increasingly, writers born late in the 19th century, such as Ethel Carnie, situate personal struggles within structural and class-based inequities subject to active redress, and their writings promote identification with a wider community less bounded by region, occupation, or ethnicity.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Working-class British Women Writers, 1840-1914: Resistance and Community
- Creators
- Florence Boos
- Contributors
- Ben Clarke (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature, pp.169-186
- Publisher
- Routledge; Abingdon, Oxon
- Series
- Routledge literature companions
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003226246-13
- Alternative title
- Working-class British Women Writers, 1840-1914
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2025
- Academic Unit
- English; International Programs
- Record Identifier
- 9984749769602771
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