Read more
Zusatztext "[An] inventive book." ---Helen Rogers, Victorian Studies Informationen zum Autor Seth Koven Klappentext "Koven's beautifully written and exquisitely researched book illuminates, with brilliance and great perception, issues of class, capitalism, empire, gender, and love in early twentieth century Britain." --Jane Shaw, Stanford University "A brilliantly told tale of the unlikely love of two women divided by class but empowered by the ideals and practice of radical Christianity. This 'intimate history' transforms conventional narratives about charity, class, gender, and labor in the early twentieth century." --Lynn Hollen Lees, University of Pennsylvania "Seth Koven's luminous account of the unlikely chemistry between Muriel Lester (self-abasing slumming lady) and Nellie Dowell (self-improving match factory girl) sheds new light on their shared milieu of Edwardian Christian radicalism: a counterculture of religious modernism founded on a theology of love, with revolutionary opportunities for pacifism, feminism, and anti-imperialism. A rare and brilliant history of the ethical subject." --Leela Gandhi, Brown University "This powerful, moving, and innovative book tells the story of the relationship between two women--one a 'grande dame of global pacifism and social justice' and the other a 'Cockney cosmopolitan' who worked as a match girl in the United Kingdom and abroad. Koven brilliantly achieves exactly what he sets out to do: dissolve the boundaries between 'lives' and 'histories.'" --Deborah Epstein Nord, Princeton University "This is a beautifully written and researched book, one that will stand as one of the best books in modern British history for years to come. The Match Girl and the Heiress is destined to become an instant classic. There is no other book like it." --Sharon Marcus, author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England "How ought one to live in a society defined by inequality? Through his subjects, Nellie Dowell and Muriel Lester, Koven tells a detective story of the heart with deep resonance for today's debates about poverty and wealth, class and empire, Christianity and capitalism, gender formation and same-sex desire, the welfare state and voluntarism. The Match Girl and the Heiress is a methodologically and conceptually inspiring work, with a fine sense of empathy, balanced by shrewdly calibrated assessments of motives and consequences." --Deborah Cohen, author of Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain Zusammenfassung How two extraordinary women crossed the Victorian class divide to put Christian teachings into practice in the slums of East London Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism. In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe—Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall—Gandhi's Lo...
