Margaret Elise Harkness aka John Law was an English radical journalist and writer
Background
Harkness was born on 28 February 1854 at Upton-on-Severn in Worcestershire. Her father, Robert, was an Anglican priest. She had four siblings and a half sister as her mother had been widowed before she married her father.
She is thought to have taken the name "Law" as part of her nom de plume because it was her mother"s maiden name or because she was also a relation of Bishop George Henry Law.
Career
Her parents were Robert and Jane Waugh Law Harkness. Her second cousin was the economist Beatrice Webb (also known as Beatrice Potter). In 1883 she wrote Assyrian and History and the following year Egyptian and History according to the Monuments.
In 1887 she published A City Girl.
In 1888 she wrote her novel Out of Work included descriptions of what happened in Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887. On that day actions by the police to control a demonstration by the unemployed resulted in injuries, one death and many arrests.
The novel Captain Lobe followed in 1889. She put her politics into action during the London Dock Strike that year when she is thought to have influenced Cardinal Manning who successfully interceded in the dispute.
She described the conditions of the poor in London but she did not make it clear about her contact with Bishop Manning although the book was dedicated to him.
She wrote a book about Indian life which was published as Glimpses of Hidden India in 1907 and as Indian Snapshots in 1912. At the end of her life she lived in France and then Italy. Her last work A Curate"s Promise: a Story of Three Weeks was published in 1921 and she died in Florence in 1923.
Politics
She was introduced to socialism and a group of people who based themselves at the British Museum Reading Room. Her friends included her sister Katie, Eleanor Marx and Annie Besant. Engels gave her advice on her novels where he proposed that she should discuss typical people and situations and not create a stark socialist approach to writing.
One of the arrests was of the socialist John Burns who she would later work with, together with Tom Mann and Henry Hyde Champion, editor of the socialist paper Justice.
Membership
In 1905 she published George Eastwood: Wanderer about her life during the 1899 Docks strike when she was briefly a member of the Social Democratic Federation.