Clash is a 1929 novel by the English socialist politician Ellen Wilkinson. It focuses on the clash between career and personal relationships, against the backdrop of the 1926 general strike.[1][2] It was Wilkinson's first novel. It was republished by Trent Editions with a new introduction by Ian Haywood and Maroula Joannou in 1998. and is still in print. Ellen Wilkinson, the first woman Labour MP, is best remembered for leading a march of the unemployed from her constituency in Jarrow to London in 1936. Her first novel Clash is set a decade earlier, during the General Strike when Wilkinson was sent as an accredited representative of the TUC to tour the country drumming up support of the strikers. The novel is a work of romantic fiction. It is semi autobiographical and book bears all the hall marks of her first-hand experience of the strike including descriptions of the time she spent with the women in the Yorkshire coal fields during the lock-out of 1926 which followed the strike.

First edition
(publ. George G. Harrap & Co.)

References edit

  1. ^ *Vernon, Betty D. (1982). Ellen Wilkinson 1891–1947. London: Croom Helm. ISBN 0-7099-2603-0.
  2. ^ Beers, L. (2011), Feminism and Sexuality in Ellen Wilkinson's Fiction, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 64 No. 2, 2011, 248–262