Sophie Rickard

When the Lancashire cotton-mill that employs them burns to the ground, sisters Rachel and Hester Martin are each forced to find their own way to survive in the harsh realities of pre-war industrial Britain. The contrasting paths they take in their quest for domestic autonomy form a subtly strident allegory of the all but insurmountable barriers of class and gender...

Robert Tressell's groundbreaking socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists tells the story of a group of working men in the fictional town of Mugsborough, and socialist journeyman-prophet Frank Owen who attempts to convince his fellow workers that capitalism is the real source of the poverty all around them. Owen's spirited attacks on the greed and dishonesty of the capitalist system,...