Pickled herrings and politics: the early journalism of Moa Martinson

Anna Hoyles’s study of the early work of the Swedish journalist and campaigner Moa Martinson (1890–1964) presents a fully engaged, lifelong political activist who escaped her poor, working-class background to cut through the Swedish left of the 1920s and create a multi-faceted persona as a working-class mother, wife, Bolshevik and feminist expressed in vivid, caustic newspaper columns. Here Hoyles explores the varied literary devices Martinson used in her journalism and argues that, together with her novels, it has helped inspire a new school of proletarian literature spearheaded by women.