author
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth
1886–1962
A mill worker who turned lived experience into fiction, she became one of Britain’s first published working-class women novelists. Her writing blends sharp social observation with a deep belief in justice, especially for women and working people.
1 Audiobook
The taming of Nan
by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth
About the author
Born in Lancashire in 1886, she grew up in a radical weaving family and worked in the cotton mills while still young. That background shaped her voice as a poet, journalist, novelist, feminist, and socialist, and helped make her work feel rooted in the realities of industrial working-class life.
She published under the names Ethel Carnie and Ethel Holdsworth as well as Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. She is widely noted as the first working-class woman in Britain to publish a novel, and she went on to write at least ten novels along with poetry, journalism, and writing for children.
Her best-known work includes Helen of Four Gates (1917), and her reputation has grown again in recent years as readers and scholars have rediscovered her as an important voice in British working-class and feminist writing. She died in 1962.