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My paper will argue that philanthropic sisterly communities are brought to the forefront in Margaret Harkness’s novel In Darkest London (1891). In ‘Women as Civil Servants’ (1881), Margaret Harkness argues that in order to achieve equality with men in the ‘sphere of action’ women must have a ‘bond of mutual helpfulness, binding together all women irrespective of class to meet the obstacles incident to changing social conditions of life’ (p. 381). As Harkness emphasises, only by crossing class barriers and assisting their ‘struggling sisters’ can women ‘command the same market price as that of the other sex’ (p. 875). Harkness’s call for female solidarity is reflected in her own work within London slums; along with Eleanor Marx and Beatrice Potter, Harkness worked in the philanthropic East London Dwelling Company in attempt to provide the poor with cheap accommodation (Ross, 2007, p. 90). As Jill Rappoport (2012) describes, groups of women like Marx, Potter and Harkness frequently self-identified as ‘slum sisters’, a term that recognises their active work within spaces of poverty as well as their solidarity as a group of New Women actively seeking to achieve social change (p. 136). I will engage with Ruth Vanita’s (1996) definition of the Sapphic mode to uncover how the ‘passionate dialogue’ that occurs between Harkness’s philanthropic women is ‘a paradigm for lyric intensity and sublimity’ (p. 2). I will consider the way in which Harkness shows the ability of this powerful dialogue to remove barriers of religion, social class and politics. Harkness’s novel anticipates Mrs. Roy Devereux’s (1896) utopic description of the future of slum sister communities; Devereux describes how through such communities women will ‘stand […] shoulder to shoulder with her sister in public and in private life [and] will stand at the very gates of her kingdom, abreast of that “brave vibration, each way free”’ (p. 61). My paper examines how In Darkest London represents the complex intersection of religion, socialism, the New Woman and sororal philanthropy at the fin-de-siècle. |
