Margaret Harkness: Writing social engagement, 1880–1921 ed. by Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson (review)

Margaret Elise Harkness, known to late-nineteenth-century readers of her reviews, essays, travel writing, and novels as John Law, may well be the most interesting yet frustratingly obscure of women writers to be rediscovered by feminist and materialist literary historians of the twentieth century. Once little more than a footnote in studies dedicated to her better-known cousin Beatrice Potter Webb or to histories of socialist and labor politics, Harkness came to critical notice in the 1990s and has continued to stimulate original research, interpretation, and speculation ever since.

With the publication of Margaret Harkness: Writing social engagement, 1880–1921, editors Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson offer a new perspective on this perplexingly elusive figure. Robertson and Janssen do a great service in curating this collection, which was stimulated by a 2014 British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and Birkbeck College symposium. Equally welcome and transformative for Harkness scholarship is the online repository maintained by Janssen and Robertson, The Harkives, an "open-access digital archive of sources by and about the author, activist and traveler Margaret Harkness" ("About the Harkives," The Harkives [Wordpress] par. 1). This worthy volume assembles most if not all of the scholars who have provided substantial groundwork for understanding Harkness's life and work. Those not included are generously referenced: early Harkness biographer Irene Snatt, for instance, is given full credit for her pioneering discoveries.

Who was Margaret Harkness? Unlike the New Woman protagonists of George Gissing and others with whom she has so often been compared, Harkness, who lived from 1854 to 1923, is not easily resolved into critical narratives based upon conceptions of proto-feminist subjectivity integral to the fiction of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot earlier in the century. An air of depersonalization and clinical objectivity characterizes much of her writing. A Reader like Amy Levy, Olive Schreiner, and Eleanor Marx, Harkness began her professional life as a writer in the British Library. She also trained as a nurse at Westminster Hospital and then as a dispenser at Guy's Hospital before becoming what we might today term an independent scholar. Dwelling in the Katharine Buildings in Aldgate as a radical journalist and political activist, Harkness was a renegade in terms of her own class identity. She was also a gender radical, as novels such as Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army (1889) make evident, although relatively little attention to non-binary identities emerges in these essays.

Researchers of women's writing and the literature of urban exploration have tended to converge on the version of Harkness who published naturalistic novels of working class life in the late 1880s and 90s. Important scholars of London's East End and urban history who first drew attention to Harkness include Ellen Ross and Seth Koven as well as Deborah Nord, Sally Ledger, and Eileen Sypher. Ruth Livesey and Lynne Hapgood are both represented in the present volume, as is David Glover, all of whom have directed much-needed critical attention to Harkness as urban chronicler. From A City Girl: A Realistic Story (1887) through Out of Work (1888) and In Darkest London (1891) to George Eastmont: Wanderer (1905), Harkness returned time and again to class conflict and to the impoverished lives of urban dwellers. Her sensibility could at times verge on the phantasmagoric, even as she embraced the naturalism of her continental counterpart Émile Zola. Bearing witness to the Matchwomen's Strike of 1888 and the Dockworkers' Strike of 1889, Harkness eschewed conventional plots, protagonists, and narration in her struggle to capture history in the making. Less familiar, and therefore most welcome to see addressed in the collection, is the Margaret Harkness who lived outside of England for years at a time, residing as a working journalist in Australia before traveling to and writing about India toward the end of her life. This late writing deserves attention, as it expands...