Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

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...See more

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. See less