Margaret Harkness (1854–1923)

Margaret Harkness was born in Upton-on-Severn in Worcestershire, England. Her parents were Robert Harkness, a conservative Anglican priest, and his wife Elizabeth. Beatrice Potter Webb, the noted economist, was her second cousin and the two became close friends. Margaret was educated at home before attending finishing school in Bournemouth. In 1877, at age 23, she rejected a marriage proposal and her father refused to support her, so she moved to London to train as a nurse at the Westminster Hospital. After she qualified, she worked as a dispenser at Guy's Hospital, but realized that her true calling was as a writer. She became a freelance journalist and novelist and often used the pen name "John Law." Harkness was drawn to socialism and feminism and joined a circle of independent women based at the British Museum Reading Room, including Beatrice Webb, Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner, Clementina Black, and Annie Besant. She contributed articles to Justice, a socialist newspaper, and wrote articles such as "Women as Civil Servants" (1881) in The Nineteenth Century, a liberal magazine. Her first books were devoted to historical topics, Assyrian Life and History (1883) and Egyptian Life and History According to the Monuments (1884). She began exploring the conditions in the East End of London and published five novels dealing with urban poverty and the slums: A City Girl (1887), Out of Work (1888), In Darkest London (1889), A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890), and George Eastmont: Wanderer (1905). She was briefly a member of the Social Democratic Federation and helped mediate in the Great Dock Strike of 1889. Between 1890 and 1914, Harkness traveled widely to Australia, New Zealand, the USA, India and Ceylon, and wrote travel books and a novel set in India, The Horoscope.

In the last years of her life, she lived in France and then Italy. She became an advocate of the ideals and work of the Salvation Army, which inspired her last novel, A Curate's Promise, A Story of Three Weeks, published in 1921.