In the late 1880s and 1890s many British writers turned to London's East End slums--a late-nineteenth-century metonym for social inequality, as Manchester had been in the midcentury. The East End became the uncharted frontier for many individuals motivated by various philanthropic and revolutionary aims: university graduates, missionaries, statisticians, political organizers, and several independent-minded upper- and middle-class women. Among the latter were the socialist writer Beatrice Webb; Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx; and the novelist Margaret Harkness, who wrote under the name John Law. A second cousin of Potter and a friend of Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner, and other socialists, Harkness for many years was an overlooked member of this group, although she had achieved some popularity in her own time. Werner G. Urlaub, in his 1977 study of late-Victorian social-problem novels, says that her novels were more widely distributed than most of the other social novels of...