Ellen Johnston

EJ is one of the few working-class Victorian women whose poetry made it into print in volume form. Along with her autobiography, her poems provide invaluable evidence of the limited opportunities—material, social, and discursive—available to an independent and articulate woman of the industrial working classes at that time in Scotland, as well as testimony to the powerful sense of pride in her community and her own abilities that sustained her will to write. Her work has recently received serious critical attention after more than a century of neglect.