Harkness, Margaret (Elise) 1854-1923 (John Law)

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HARKNESS, Margaret (Elise) 1854-1923 (John Law)

PERSONAL: Born February 28, 1854, at Upton-on-Severn, Worcestershire, England; died October 10, 1923, in Florence, Italy; daughter of Robert (an Anglican priest) and Jane Waugh Law Harkness. Politics: Socialist.

CAREER: Nurse trainee, 1877-81; journalist and freelance writer, 1881-1921.

MEMBER: Social Democratic Federation; Labour Party.

WRITINGS:

Assyrian Life and History ("By-paths of Bible Knowledge" no. 2), Religious Tract Society (London, England), 1883.

Egyptian Life and History according to the Monuments ("By-paths of Bible Knowledge" no. 6), Religious Tract Society (London, England), 1884.

Out of Work, Swan Sonnenschein (London, England), 1888, with introduction by Bernadette Kirwan, Dee (Chicago, IL), 1990.

A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day, Authors' Cooperative Publishing (London, England), 1890.

AS JOHN LAW

A City Girl: A Realistic Story, Garland (London, England), 1884.

Tempted London: Young Men, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1888.

Toilers in London: or Inquiries concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1889.

Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1889, published as In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe, A Story of the Salvation Army, Reeves (London, England), 1891, published as Captain Lobe, Hodder & Stoughton, 1915.

Imperial Credit, Vardon & Pritchard (Adelaide, Australia), 1899.

George Eastmont: Wanderer, Burns & Oates (London, England), 1905.

Glimpses of Hidden India, Thacker, Spink (Calcutta, India), 1909, revised as Indian Snapshots: A Bird's-Eye View of India from the Days of the Saib Company to the Present Time, 1912.

Modern Hyderabad (Deccan), Thacker, Spink (Calcutta, India), 1914.

The Horoscope, Thacker, Spink (Calcutta, India), 1915.

A Curate's Promise: A Story of Three Weeks, September 14-October 5, 1917, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1921.

Contributed to Nineteenth Century, Justice, Pall Mall Gazette, New Review, Woman's Herald, and Fortnightly Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Margaret Harkness—or John Law, as she called herself in print—is best known for her socially radical fiction of the late nineteenth century. Her empathetic portrayal of impoverished women's lives stands her apart from such like-minded writers as George Gissing, George Bernard Shaw, and Rudyard Kipling. As Eileen Sypher suggested in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "Harkness' novels are important because they offer the student of turn-of-the-[twentieth-]century England a different perspective than that found in the writing of better known authors.... Not only are her novels among the few of the period to record the impact of socialist ideas on the working class, but they also provide a portrait of women both in the social movement and in slum life." Harkness's fiction chronicles the radical movement from a female perspective, and reveals how socialism was constructed in her day.

Harkness's family, according to a writer in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, was "clerical and conventional," and much of Harkness' work seems reactive to her parents' strictness. Herfather, Robert Harkness, was an Anglican priest, and her mother, Jane Waugh Law Harkness, had aristocratic ties. Beatrice Potter, with whom Harkness was close early in her life, was Harkness's second cousin. As Sypher explained, however: "Potter's letters provide a portrait of Harkness in her early youth as restless and given to depression and in her twenties and thirties as ambitious and hysterical—but this portrait of Harkness as a neurotic is supplied by Potter, and no confirmation has been found."

Aiding others was Harkness's calling. She tried nursing, but gave that up to pursue journalism and writing in London. Once there, Harkness became deeply involved with the suffering of East End slum residents. She explained this in Imperial Credit, writing how, after her father's 1886 death, she "determined to do something to lessen the miseries of those who to-day have neither land nor money." Harkness sacrificed herself while trying to help the destitute; in 1887, her friend Olive Schreiner wrote to Havelock Ellis: "Maggie has no money and she came thinking I would support her." Soon after her father's death Harkness inherited a sizable estate, but still appeared to have been desperate to help more of London's poor, remaining poor herself.

Possibly in an effort to support herself, Harkness began to write popular novels under the name John Law. Sypher wrote: "She might have chosen the name because Law was her mother's maiden name, signaling her developing feminism, although it might have been chosen for John Law of Lauriston, a seventeenth-century French eccentric whose economic theories are seen by some as foreshadowing modern state socialism." Regardless, the novels did well enough to help Harkness financially—and perhaps help Harkness' middle-class readers understand urban hardship.

In the first of these novels, A City Girl: A Realistic Story, Harkness tells of Nellie, an apparently illegitimate child who works as a seamstress. Nellie is engaged, but nonetheless falls for a genteel married man, Arthur. When Arthur impregnates Nellie, she decides to raise her baby alone amid neighbors' ostracism. She manages, with the Salvation Army's help, but the baby dies anyway. Arthur finally finds Nellie again, and with the Salvation Army's guidance, he marries her.

Realistic detail bolsters the novel's pat, sentimental ending. Friedrich Engels praised the novel's truthfulness of presentation, though he found it "not quite realistic enough." The novel attempts to forge understanding between middle-class readers and poor people, whom Harkness represents. The resolution between middle-class Arthur and lower-class Nellie offers political as well as emotional overtones.

Harkness's best-known novel, Captain Lobe, again trumpets the Salvation Army. The book's "slum saviours" tour a hellish underworld of poverty, overpopulation, filth and despair. Within this world, women provide much hope; as Sypher suggested: "The novel particularly shows the strength of women . . . [who] occasionally form female subcultures, as strong women support weaker ones." A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day depicts the problems powerful women endure. Harkness considers the pain of Mary Dillon, a widow who must sell her means of support in order to feed her starving infant. Unable to continue to feed the baby, she kills it with opium rather than have it starve to death. When a psychiatrist attempts to help Mary, she commits suicide.

Though many Harkness novels appear to offer conservative, not revolutionary resolutions, she appealed to her middle-class audience for immediate sympathy for the working class. Harkness's novels never preached revolution, but rather exposed poverty to those who might help immediately.

Late in Harkness's career, she abandoned radicalism, claiming she was "got at, abused and misunderstood by the people who call themselves socialist." She complains in Imperial Credit: "Birth, sex, and temperament have prevented me from coming forward openly among those who are fighting in the labor ranks." Following this break, Harkness wrote a few novels, mostly dealing with the beauty of pre-Empire India.

Harkness's perspective, which her socialist contemporaries marginalized, enhances the study of radical writing in England. Her novels realistically display the urban poor, but insist on idealizing the connection between the middle and lower classes. Her novels imagine women broken by economic forces even as they advocate women's power as the only possible salvation for the underprivileged.