Kennedy & Boyd - The Great Experiment

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The Great Experiment


	Ethel Carnie Holdsworth with an Introduction by Florence S. Boos and a Biographical Afterword by David S. Rycroft
	ISBN 9781849212519
	SERIES Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.
	Paperback

	Published April 2026 UK Price £14.95 US Price $19.95
*This is the first publication of The Great Experiment* in book form.** In a re-interpretation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 Pygmalion, Carnie Holdsworth presents the story of a relationship across the class divide, as the ‘gifted’ working-class writer Cora Drummond marries the middle-class Henry Hales. There is social discrimination and distrust between their two families—Henry’s mother is belittling of Cora and Cora’s alcoholic father suspects Henry of mistreating her and though bearing goodwill towards one another, the married couple too struggle to reconcile their differences. Carnie Holdsworth makes use of the text to show how a marriage might evolve into a co-operative partnership, in which a husband with an interest in clerical matters comes to appreciate a sense of spirituality and shared humanity through the instruction of his working-class ‘protegee.’ Thorny issues between individuals from the different classes are overcome through atonement and reconciliation in a plot which suggests a more subtle reorganisation of society than in her other more well-known works. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962) was a working-class writer and socialist activist who campaigned for social and economic justice and the rights of working-class men and women. A poet, journalist, writer for children, and novelist, she worked in the Lancashire cotton mills from the age of eleven until her early twenties. She left the mills through the patronage of the popular socialist author and Clarion leader, Robert Blatchford (1851-1943), and worked as a journalist in London and as a teacher at Bebel House Women’s College and Socialist Education Centre, before returning back North to her roots. She had two daughters and edited the Clear Light, the organ of the National Union for Combating Fascism, with her husband from their home in the 1920s. She wrote at least ten novels, making her a rare example of a female working-class novelist.