Poet, campaigner and pioneering author – Blackburn ILPer Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was a radical writer of the early 20th century who made history as the first working class woman to have a novel published in Britain.
Now one of her most political works has been adapted and reimagined in graphic form by two sisters from the same Lancashire cotton country where her hard hitting story was set 100 years ago
Originally published in 1925, This Slavery was one of 10 novels published by Carnie Holdsworth during her lifetime of activism and authorship. According to her biographer, Roger Smalley, it is the book in which she made “her most bitter attack on capitalism, a system so inimical to the working class, she said, that it should be overthrown”.
A poet, journalist and feminist campaigner, Carnie Holdsworth wanted her work “to sting people into rebellion against poverty and fire their hearts with a cause”. This Slavery was no exception.
The novel tells the tale of sisters Rachel and Hester Martin who are thrown out of work when their cotton mill burns down. Forced to find new ways to survive, one agitates for reform, striving to free her community from the enslavement of the factory system, while the other submits to the slavery of a patriarchal marriage.
Lost classic
Described as a “lost classic”, this century old tale of poverty and hope on the cobbled streets of industrial Lancashire has been transformed for modern readers thanks to a “sumptuous adaptation” by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard.
Brought up in the Ribble Valley, artist Scarlett and writer Sophie have previously collaborated on graphic versions of Robert Tressell’s socialist classic, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, nominated for the 2022 Eisner awards, and No Surrender by sufragette Constance Maud.
This Slavery will be published in the UK on 11 September by SelfMadeHero, who include this note on the book’s title: “Transatlantic slavery was an abhorrent and unprecedented crime against humanity. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s book is specifically about sexual slavery within a patriarchy, and wage slavery within industrial capitalism.
“Her title uses ‘This’ to make a clear distinction between the non-consensual labour of her own experience, and that of others. The story does not compare with, nor diminish the evils of, transatlantic slavery.”
As Smalley writes in his profile: “Collectively, Ethel’s writing amounted to a devastating attack on capitalism in all its forms… She believed that: ‘It is too easy to give people what they want. The difficult task is to teach them to want something better.’”
One hundred years later, there could hardly be a more fitting message for our times.
—-
You can read Roger Smalley’s ILP profile of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth here.
His biography of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Breaking the Bonds of Capitalism: the political vision of a Lancashire mill girl, is available here.
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery, a graphic novel by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard is available in paperback for £18.99 and can be pre-ordered from SelfMadeHero or the Rickard sisters.
More information about Ethel Carnie Holdsworth is available from the Pendle Radicals.
Trouble at Mill: the radical world of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, a live music and theatre event featuring the Commoners’ Choir and ballad singer Jennifer Reid, is at Queen Street Mill Textile Museum, Burnley, on Saturday 8 November 2025 at 12-4pm.
