ABSTRACT
Within a brief span of less than six years, some 35 poems were published under the by-line of 'Marie', a factory dye-worker (later, 'Factory inspector') of Chorley, Lancashire. So obscure is this writer’s personal history, that Maidment groups her with ‘barely recoverable artisan writers’ (Maidment, p. 214). In terms of combined readership, ‘Marie’ may well have outstripped the majority of her middle-class sisters. Her poems and a prose essay were published in The People’s Journal (later The People’s and Howitt’s Journal); Eliza Cook’s Journal and The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor. In ‘An Autumn Evening’, a prose dialogue on urban versus rural living, ‘Marie’ questions the prevalent Manichean view of the corrupt polis by stressing the primacy of the individual will: ‘“temptation” is little else but “inclination”.
