'Be Still and Listen': Encountering and Understanding the East in Margaret Harkness's Writings

Margaret Harkness (1854-1923), a late-Victorian social activist, journalist, and author of ‘slum novels’, has recently garnered renewed scholarly attention, shedding light on the multi-faceted nature of her work. Building on this scholarship, this chapter explores how Harkness’s desire to encounter and understand the East shaped and stimulated her writings throughout her life. Focusing especially on her non-fiction book Glimpses of Hidden India (1909), the chapter argues that the East the Harkness represents there is in dialogue with another East she encountered two decades earlier: the East of London, the setting of the three novels that form her so-called ‘London slum trilogy’, published between 1887 and 1891. By comparing Harkness’s experiences in the two different types of East, the chapter demonstrates that the strategies that Harkness devised to challenge middle-class assumptions about East End poverty in the late 1880s proved crucial in shaping the representation of the East in her 1909 Indian book, where she eschewed dominant colonialist approaches to the history and culture of the subcontinent. In particular, while Harkness’s In Darkest London (1891) rejected the discursive construction of the East End as a space of otherness by countering imperial tropes and middle-class biases embedded in the realist and naturalist novel, Glimpses of Hidden India adapted some key themes and narrative techniques derived from the London East novels to the Indian context, thus positioning the East as a space that needs to be listened to attentively in order to move beyond stereotypes and colonialist assumptions.