Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates: Recasting Melodrama in Novel and Cinematic Form

Abstract

This chapter begins by outlining how the former mill worker Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s writing career developed at the beginning of the twentieth century and, in particular, how her journalistic work enabled her to develop theories including a conception of emotional sensibility as a key component of both class and poetic consciousness. Analysis of Helen of Four Gates shows how it distils these theories within a melodramatic framework that aligns romance conventions with socialist-feminist aims in order to reimagine freedom. The chapter goes on to discuss, how due to Carnie Holdsworth’s underlying narrative, the 1921 film version of Helen of Four Gates provides a darker vision of post-First-World-War England than the pastoral norms of its cinematic competitors, which complicates the class and gender politics of such films.