“I READ THE PAPERS and have a little political world of my own.” So Margaret Harkness confided to her second cousin Beatrice Potter (who would later marry the Fabian Sidney Webb) in a letter sent in February 1880 (qtd. in Hapgood 130). Subsequently disavowed by her repressive father, an Anglican priest, because she was insufficiently subordinate to him, Harkness was still living at home at this time. Her social isolation, as well as her political frustration, is palpable. But if the tone of this apparently resigned statement is poignant, it is at the same time too defiant to be dismissed as self-pitying. Later in the 1880s she worked among the poor and unemployed in the East End of London, the environment that she explored in some seven novels written under the pseudonym “John Law,” from A City Girl (1887) to George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). In this decade she also circulated, uneasily enough, in the Social Democratic Federation, a socialist organization dominated by the acolytes of Friedrich Engels, vainly searching for a progressive model of friendship that might alleviate her sense of alienation. Indeed, Harkness became a formidable activist as well as an impressive novelist. She seems however to have grown disillusioned with socialist politics in the 1890s and to have drifted into philanthropic activities instead (see Ledger 144).