The Return of a Novel Better Left Unread : MARGRET HOWTH, <i> by Rebecca Harding Davis,</i> The Feminist Press, $11.95, 266 pages

“Margret Howth” is one of the very worst novels I’ve ever read, and there’s no one to complain to, because Rebecca Harding Davis wrote it 130 years ago.

It has been reprinted by the Feminist Press, and one of the reasons for this--according to Jean Fagan Yellin, who writes the afterward here--is to chart “the ‘feminization’ of a text by a woman writer (which) helps explain the gaps in that text, the ubiquity of patriarchy’s True Woman in American fiction, and Rebecca Harding’s subsequent success as a popular writer.”

Let’s paraphrase that. Harding had written a novella, “Life in the Iron Mills,” which called attention to the hard lot of girls who worked in the mills. About the same time, a famous transcendentalist wrote a piece on the same subject, “The Tartarus of Maids.”

On the eve of, and during the first year of, the Civil War, Rebecca Harding wrote “Margret Howth,” in which she again takes the reader into the milieu of the American working class. She sets this novel in Indiana, which is a made-up Indiana, with forests, rivers, the prairie on one side and a dank industrial town on the other. The town comes outfitted with slums, a mix of races, and a ferociously unhealthful wool factory.

The characters include: Margret Howth, 20 years old, whose parents, a blind schoolmaster and his aristocratic wife, live in dire poverty on an outlying farm. (The schoolmaster talks and acts like a Southern gentleman--the author came from a prosperous Southern family--but what’s he doing on a broken-down Indiana farm?)

They get their vegetables from Lois, a black girl, who worked in the factory from age 7 to 16. Either that experience crippled her body and removed her intelligence, or she was born that way. Everyone says she’s sick and retarded, but she conducts that thriving vegetable business, and is the most popular character in the book.

Margret works as a bookkeeper in the odious wool factory (what do they do? dye it? weave it?). She is torn between two men: Dr. Knowles, a co-owner of the factory, a supposedly villainous creature who wants to use his money to start a utopian commune to minister to the homeless, and Mr. Holmes, a supposedly admirable man whom Margret loves.

Holmes is determined, however, to marry Miss Herne, daughter of the other co-owner, so that he can get enough money to have the time to cultivate his own Higher Self.

Yellin has discovered that this novel originally had a “sad” ending which has been lost. Harding’s publisher asked for a happy ending, and Harding gave it to him. Yellin puts this down to feminist oppression. (As if publishers didn’t implore all others to come up with a happy ending every once in a while!)

It’s a lousy novel. What’s that aristocrat doing on an Indiana farm that doesn’t even seem to be in Indiana? Who dumped whom in the first place--Margret Howth or Mr. Holmes? How can Holmes even pretend to find his Higher Self if he stoops to marry for money? How can Dr. Knowles be so sinister up front when all he wants to do is help the homeless? If Lois is a helpless cripple, how did she manage to hold down a mill job?

Her father, who has just been released from the penitentiary, commits another crime (but what is it?) before he burns down the wool factory. Holmes, who almost dies in this fire, spends months in the hospital, but what’s wrong with him? It’s not burns; he’s as handsome as ever. “Latent inflammation” is not a sufficient explanation.

These characters are very familiar in the historical context of the time: those put upon factory workers, those misguided reformers, that set of people intent on self-perfection as life’s great hobby.

You can find them all in Hawthorne’s “The Blythedale Romance,” Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Moby Dick,” and especially in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” where, if a baby gets sick, you know it’s from scarlet fever! But you can’t make head or tail of “Margret Howth.”

If you are unfortunate enough to have to read it for a class, look for feudal imagery, the master-slave dynamic. You’ll get a decent term paper out of it.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck” by David M. Raup (W.W. Norton).