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THE MATCH GIRL AND THE HEIRESS
By: Seth Koven
Princeton University Press
January 2015
On Sale: January 9, 2015
Featuring: Nellie Dowell; Muriel Lester
452 pages
ISBN: 0691158509
EAN: 9780691158501
Kindle: B00OQTOLCE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction History
Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christβs teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth- century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism. In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globeβNellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley HallβGandhiβs London home in 1931 and Britainβs first βpeopleβs houseβ founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliationβand sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship. The Match Girl and the Heiress probes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal.
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