General Belinda

About 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 and worked as a journalist in London and as a teacher at Bebel House Women's College and Socialist Education Centre before returning 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. Roger Smalley is a retired teacher whose publications include 'Breaking the Bonds of Capitalism: the political vision of a Lancashire mill girl' (Lancaster University 2014). He is currently working on a history of the Clitheroe parliamentary constituency which relates Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's activities to the wider tradition of dissent in north Lancashire.