Böcker av Margaret Harkness

In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City Girl: A Realistic Story, calling it "a small work of art." A City Girl was one of many slum novels set in the East End of London in the 1880s. It tells the story of a young East Ender, Nelly Ambrose, who is seduced and abandoned by a middle-class bureaucrat. After the birth of her child and betrayal by her family, Nelly is rescued by two outside forces: the Salvation Army and a sympathetic local man, George, who wants to marry her despite her "fallen" status. While Nelly's relative passivity and social ignorance distinguish her from contemporary New Woman heroines, Harkness's sympathy for Nelly's position and refusal to judge her morally make A City Girl a fascinating and original novel. This Broadview Edition includes contemporary reviews of A City Girl along with historical documents on London's East End, fallen women in late-Victorian fiction, and reform organizations for East End women.

Nelly Ambrose is an East End seamstress with ideas above her station. Discontented with her reliable but conservative fiancé, George, she falls for the urbane charms of middle-class Arthur Grant, a married man bothered by few moral scruples. In her first novel, Harkness presents a vivid and troubling depiction of working-class life in late-Victorian London. Based on her own experience of the slums, she exposes the appalling conditions experienced by women in the casual labour force and their desperate struggle for economic security. Friedrich Engels famously wrote a letter to Harkness after reading her novel, describing it as 'the old, old story, the proletarian girl seduced by a middle-class man'. While he praised her storytelling, Engels criticised her portrayal of the working classes as passive. In this critical edition, Deborah Mutch demonstrates that while Harkness eschewed revolutionary politics, A City Girl embodies her desire to marry socialist goals with human empathy.