The article discusses the early Finnish working-class writer Elvira Willman (1875–1925). Through a reading of a recently found manuscript of the 1916 play “Rakkauden orjuus” [The slavery of love], the article demonstrates how in Willman’s writing “the woman question” was one of the central themes in texts aimed at the working-class cultural field. Theoretically, the article promotes a view according to which an author does not become a working-class author by being born into a certain social class or living among it, but by signaling in various ways in her writing a desire to be interpreted as an author of working-class literature and by garnering affirmation from the gatekeepers of that field.