Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, British author (also published as Ethel Carnie and Ethel Holdsworth), 1886-1962

Childhood

The British writer Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was born on January 1, 1886 into a radical weaving family in Great Harwood, Lancashire. She started part-time work at Delph Road mill in Great Harwood aged eleven and was in full-time employment at St. Lawrence mill from thirteen. In her later articles for The Woman Worker, she described her experience as "slavery".

Education

Holdsworth attended Great Harwood British School from 1892. According to Edmund and Ruth Frow, she showed promise in composition and often had her essays read out to the rest of the class, but otherwise showed no outstanding ability. Studied at Owens College (University of Manchester) during the 1911/12 academic session and matriculated on January 11, 1912.

Early writing

Holdsworth started composing poetry while working as a winder at the St. Lawrence mill.Her first book of poems, Rhymes from the Factory, was published in 1907. Robert Blatchford, proprietor of The Clarion, interviewed Ethel Carnie at 76 Windsor Road, Great Harwood, in the summer of 1908 and offered her a job writing articles and poems for his weekly paper, The Woman Worker, in London. Carnie was dismissed after six months for reasons which remain obscure, according to Dr Roger Smalley, the author of a Ph.d thesis on Holdsworth. A second book of poems, Songs of a Factory Girl, was published in 1911, and her third and final collection of poems, Voices of Womanhood, followed three years later. Holdsworth taught creative writing at Bebel House in London in 1913, but returned to Great Harwood before the end of the year. Her first novel, Miss Nobody, was published in the same year.

Political activities

Holdsworth protested against the introduction of conscription in World War 1. During the 1920s she edited The Clear Light, an anti-fascist journal, with her husband Alfred Holdsworth. In this period she also published a series of sonnets in the anarchist journal Freedom, protesting at the imprisonment of anarchists in Soviet jails.

Literary significance

Dr Kathleen Bell is one of the leading figures in the campaign to introduce the work of this long-forgotten writer to a new generation. She writes that "at its best, Holdsworth's poetry illuminates the gap between working-class people's desire for liberty, often evident in their imaginative capacity, and the constraints and suffering of their lives."The children's story `The Blind Prince' (in The Lamp Girl and other stories (1913) shows the influence of Oscar Wilde. This Slavery (1925) is Holdsworth's best-known work. Holdsworth wrote poems and short stories until 1936 but there is no record of her writing after this date. Holdsworth's daughter Margaret told an interviewer that her mother stopped writing because she was worn out and depressed about the imminent outbreak of World War 2. Two of Holdsworth's novels, All On Her Own (1929) and This Slavery, are to be republished by Trent Editions.

Miscellaneous

The composer Ethel Smyth included two of Holdsworth's poems in a song cycle (Three Songs, 1913) which was premiered in London. The novel Helen of Four Gates (1917) was filmed in 1920. Prints exist in the Cinémathèque Québécoise film archive [35mm positive] , and in the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House film archive [16mm reduction positive] . Holdsworth is buried at Blackley Cemetery, Manchester (Non-conformists' section - Grave A 183).