Cariad Williams, 3rd year English Literature and European Literature and Culture student writes:
It was a pleasure to be involved in the process of re-publishing Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates, not least because the novel itself is an interesting and exciting romance which can easily be compared to Wuthering Heights in its story of doomed romance set in the lonely moors. The main pleasure I found came from the fact that Holdsworth is an important writer – as a turn of the century working-class woman, there are not many authors of her kind, and the project to republish and introduce her work to a modern audience is something in which I strongly believe. Keeping the text as close as possible to the original was what I found to be most exciting; it brought me closer to Holdsworth and it made me think of the impact of the publisher upon texts. How close was the edition I was working with (which was a first edition) to the text that Holdsworth herself produced? Above all, I hope that in republishing the text we are going some way to re-introduce this largely neglected author to a new generation of readers.
Kennedy and Boyd’s Ethel Carnie Holdsworth series: http://www.kennedyandboyd.co.uk/series/ethel_carnie_holdsworth.htm
For more on the recently rediscovered black and white film version: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/may/31/helen-of-four-gates-film
