Margaret Harkness

Margaret Harkness
Margaret Harkness aka John Law in 1890
Born	28 February 1854 Upton-upon-Severn
Died	10 December 1923 Florence
Pen name	John Law
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	United Kingdom
Literary movement	Socialist

Margaret Elise Harkness aka John Law (28 February 1854 – 10 December 1923) was an English radical journalist and writer.

Harkness was born on 28 February 1854 at Upton-on-Severn in Worcestershire. Her parents were Robert and Jane Waugh Law Harkness. 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. Her second cousin was the economist Beatrice Webb (also known as Beatrice Potter). 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.

After attending a finishing school in Bournemouth, she left home at the age of 23 to make her living. She there trained as a nurse and worked as a dispenser. Harkness lived in various locations in London with her cousin, Beatrice Webb, in Katherine Buildings near St. Katherine's Dock, where Webb worked as a rent collector. She had a difficult relationship with a Radical politician, Joseph Chamberlain, that ultimately foundered, after which she started thinking of herself as a "glorified spinster," able to devote herself completely to her work.

In her works of social investigation, Harkness uses a tone of social realism or naturalism, making her different from her male contemporarites. With the financial assistance of her sister and Beatrice Webb she was able to continue living in London, and become a writer. In 1883 she wrote Assyrian Life and History and the following year Egyptian Life and History according to the Monuments. 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, Olive Schreiner, and Annie Besant. Susan David Bernstein argues that this group of women enacted a "transformation of women's work that "entails a proliferation of women's labor across private homes and public spaces." In 1887 she published A City Girl. 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.