Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s New Fairy Tales for the Working Class

Between 1911 and 1914, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth published four books of original fairy tales. Decades in advance of the progressive rewriting of fairy tales that later twentieth-century writers produced, Carnie Holdsworth’s fairy tales are working-class and feminist revisions of this significant genre that revalue work (manual labor and housework) and appropriate the genre for anticapitalist ideas. Readers of her fairy tales thus discover a lost voice in the history of the fairy tale and a significant reviser of its meanings.