Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886–1962)

A torrid melodrama set in a remote farm on the Lancashire moors, this sometimes feels like the love-child of Wuthering Heights and The return of the native. The old miser Amos is tortured by his need to get posthumous revenge on the woman who jilted him many years ago, and he has adopted and brought up her orphan daughter Helen purely as an instrument of this revenge. With this in mind, he manipulates the decent farmhand Martin into rejecting Helen's love, and instead marries her off to the vicious tramp Fielding Day, whom he encourages to subject her to all kinds of domestic abuse.

The plot may be dramatically and psychologically flawed and the male characters little more than caricatures, but the forceful, individualistic Helen and her perpetually multitasking housewife friend Lizzie are both wonderfully detailed, interesting individuals, whilst the horror of Helen's situation and the violence she is exposed to are depicted in frighteningly believable ways. And there's a lot of landscape description that is vivid and sharply observed, even if its manner owes a bit too much to Hardy.… (meer)

The taming of Nan starts off rather alarmingly, with Nan Cherry going off into an unprovoked and apparently quite involuntary attack of rage against her gentle-giant husband, Bill. It soon becomes clear that this is a regular occurrence — Bill and teenage daughter Polly merely chide Nan for inflicting it on them before breakfast — but she refuses to stop throwing things until she has provoked Bill, much against his will, into "giving her a thrashing" to calm her down. Before going off to his job as a railway porter, Bill has to take his valuables to a neighbour, to stop Nan pawning them to go off drinking. There's not much idealising of the married state going on here.

Then Bill has an accident at work and finds himself trapped at home, at Nan's mercy. Meanwhile, Polly is starting to build a career as a semi-professional soprano, whilst getting tangled up in a Hardyesque romance plot with the serially unlucky small farmer Adam Wild. Plenty of trouble ahead...

The fun of this book is mostly in its very unromantic and down-to-earth depiction of working-class Lancashire people and the way they think, speak and act, the large and small problems that they face in their daily lives. Absolutely the opposite end of the scale from Dickens's bizarre and implausible notions of "the North" in Hard Times. I was struck by the way Holdsworth keeps sneaking in mentions of her characters' — real, but necessarily fragmented — passions for bits of "high culture". The grannie with pictures of Milton and Cromwell on her wall, the farmer and mill-girl who are both crazy about Handel and Grieg, and so on. The border between high and low art has always been porous in both directions.

Holdsworth borrows bits of plot and elements of style freely from all sorts of different writers, old and new, serious and popular, perhaps most obviously Mrs Gaskell and the Brontës, Balzac and Zola, Hardy and Arnold Bennett (maybe also D.H. Lawrence?), and seems to be pasting them together any old how, without bothering to put up a sign to say whether she considers herself a romantic or a realist, but the result seems to work well in spite of that: there's a huge amount of energy and momentum in the plot, carrying us forward at a tremendous rate.

There's not much in the way of explicit politics in this book: maybe a general underlying theme of the demands society puts on working-class women to do paid work and bear children and run households. Nan's idea that she has failed to live up to this standard is at the root of her breakdown. And Polly redeems herself from the risk of becoming a "flapper" by learning to churn butter and bake cakes. But there are also a lot of interesting little details in the background, like Bill's legal action (supported eventually by the NUR) to force the railway company to base his disability pension on actual earnings including tips, which came to about twice his nominal wages. Very interesting.… (meer)