Adapted from a novel by the radical author Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, we witness the starkly observed realities of what it was like to be female in pre-war industrial Britain.
Thrown out of work when the cotton mill burns down, sisters Rachel and Hester Martin are forced to find new ways to survive. One agitates for reform, striving to free her community from the enslavement of the factory system; the other submits to the slavery of a patriarchal marriage. A hundred years after the first publication of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s lost classic, this sumptuous adaptation by sisters Scarlett and Sophie Rickard weaves her tale of romance and hope through the cobbled streets of industrial Lancashire.
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886–1962), a writer, feminist and activist from Lancashire, was the first working-class woman to have a novel published in Britain. She had at least ten novels published including This Slavery in 1925. The Rickard Sisters are graphic novelists from the same Lancashire cotton-country as Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, and have collaborated on adapting a series of early 20th-century political novels in their own lavish trademark style including Eisner nominated The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and No Surrender. Scarlett is the artist and Sophie is the writer, and despite living 200 miles apart, they work closely together to perfect the development of these rich, vibrant, and inspirational books.
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