"Whilst working at my frame": The Poetic Production of Ethel Carnie

Abstract

represent the conflicted status of the individual, female, working-class poet acclaimed by the middle-and upper-class readers. Unlike the literary careers of many nineteenth-century male British working-class poets, or even of the American "factory girl" poet, Lucy Larcom, the poetic profession of Johnston and Carnie did not permanently thrust them into the middleand upper-class societies of mid-nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury Great Britain. Instead, like British factory worker and magazine poet Fanny Forrester, Ellen Johnston, and Ethel Carnie rose to prominence among the middle class and then faded from middle-class view into the obscurity of the industrial community. Johnston and Carnie knowingly wrote to and compiled poems for a disparate audience for their bound volumes. The literary career and production of Ethel Carnie (1886-c.1960), a woman who published three volumes of poetry and ten novels in the early twentieth century, may be compared to and contrasted with the careers and works of her working-class poetic foremothers. Like her working-class predecessors, Carnie, a South Lancashire mill girl, began working in the textile factories during her early adolescent years. Like other women poets, she initially published poems in local periodicals and in labor presses. The poetics and subject matter of Carnie's bound volumes exemplify the poet's anxiety over gender roles and the social position of white working-class women. Although separated by more than six decades from the career of Lucy Larcom (1824-1893), the literary career of this British poet follows a trajectory similar to that of the American factory girl. Just as Larcom's early poetry was noticed by poet and middle-class social activist John Greenleaf Whittier, so too, Carnie's periodical poetry attracted the attention of middleclass male mentors W. H. Burnett and the editor of The Clarion, Robert