Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 by Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson

Reviewed by: Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 by Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson Rob Breton (bio) Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson, Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. xxi + 237, £80/$120 hardcover. Margaret Harkness has been a somewhat mysterious figure for scholars of late nineteenth-century England in part because of the multiple ways that she can be identified or labeled. None of these ways, one imagines, would have completely satisfied her. As a novelist, journalist, social explorer, global traveller, socialist, and radical activist, Harkness can give the impression of enigmatic restlessness or evasiveness, despite a personal and professional life that frequently placed her at the center of late-Victorian politics. Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson have put together an impressive collection of essays on Harkness that only confirms this impression— not the impression of an inconsistent writer but of someone constantly experimenting and constantly challenging both herself and others’ expectations of her. The dozen essays taken together create a portrait of a woman whose “ambition and engagement often surpassed apparent opportunity,” as Janssen and Robertson claim in their introduction (4). Perhaps because of her social and occupational slipperiness, Harkness has become increasingly identified as a key figure in late nineteenth- century literary studies (as well as political studies, periodical studies, feminist studies, and so on). Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 will be a helpful and significant resource for scholars working on Harkness and her many interests. The volume not only fills gaps in our knowledge of Harkness and points towards further research, but it also attempts to redefine the critical categories that we use to define her and her historical context, even as Harkness herself seemed unenthused by these categories. After Janssen and Robertson’s introduction, which nicely outlines a history of Harkness scholarship and her broadening reputation, the collection is divided into five parts. Terry Elkiss boldly begins the first section with a biographical chapter that draws on “known, obscure, and redis-covered sources” to map Harkness’s evolution as a writer and journalist (17). In fact, readers of Victorian Periodicals Review will be happy to see that many of the chapters draw upon Harkness’s journalism to explain her growth as a radical, social anthropologist, and novelist. She was a writer of the moment, so even her novels have the day-to-day feel of journalism. The second essay in this section, by Tabitha Sparks, sees Harkness’s journalistic experiences as informing her novels but also warns against a bio-critical approach, especially with her “slum novels” A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891). Sparks, who published a recommendable edition [End Page 814] of A City Girl in 2017 with Broadview Press, convincingly theorizes that Harkness’s use of her pseudonym John Law was “the first step in a strategy of narrative depersonalization” (49). The second part of the book situates Harkness in London, the setting of her most famous works. Nadia Valman reads Harkness’s slum novels in the context of socialism’s suspicion of the novel form in the late-nineteenth century, adding that Harkness developed a literary style in part from her journalistic experiences. Eliza Cubitt’s fascinating chapter looks at the question of unmarried working-class women and leisure in Harkness’s work, arguing that Harkness was working through her ideas about feminism and socialism in these ambiguous representations of leisure. The following chapter by David Glover extends the discussion on Harkness’s novels and journalism to her last major novel, George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), examining how it departs from her earlier work only to return to some of the same questions. Part three of the collection, “Harkness and Genre,” includes three riveting essays that explore how Harkness’s novels often defy or at least disturb generic categories. Ruth Livesey smartly examines the soundscapes, or the noise, in Harkness’s East End, looking at the way A City Girl debates modes and methods of representation. Livesey contrasts Harkness’s innovations when documenting urban mass culture to Henry James’s aestheticization of poverty and activism in The Princess Casamassima (1885–86) to demonstrate how the former resisted pre...

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