‘The Novelist … Must Write About Politics’: Mary Agnes Hamilton and the Politics of Modern Fiction

Abstract

Writing in the book review columns of the feminist periodical Time and Tide, the novelist, journalist and future Labour MP Mary Agnes Hamilton stated in November 1920 that: ‘Politics overshadow the whole of our horizon. To tell the artist … to leave them alone is ridiculous … he [sic] must write about politics’. Over the course of a decade Hamilton reviewed hundreds of books for Time and Tide – many of them novels – and in this writing she returns repeatedly to the theme of art and politics, rejecting a high modernist regard for aestheticism and insisting on the political responsibility of the artist. This article situates Hamilton’s book reviews alongside the account she left of her Bloomsbury connections in her memoir Remembering My Good Friends (1944) and the diary of Virginia Woolf who left several records of her encounters with Hamilton. Exploring the early friendship of these two writers and their conversations about writing, Section One reconstructs the political and journalistic career of Hamilton and identifies her as a possible model for Woolf’s activist character Mary Datchett in Night and Day (1919). Section Two analyses the combined artistic and political consciousness of Hamilton’s fourth novel published the same year, Full Circle (1919), and reads Hamilton’s rehabilitation of the novel as a vehicle for politics in Time and Tide as a rejoinder not only to Bloomsbury aesthetics but also to socialist fellow-travellers who had turned to the theatre and abandoned the novelistic form. Challenging contemporary distinctions between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ reading, Hamilton adds further to early twentieth-century debates about modern fiction and, I argue, deserves recognition as an important woman radical of the interwar years.

Keywords:

• Mary Agnes Hamilton
• Virginia Woolf
• Time and Tide
• modern fiction

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am thinking here of the excellent volume Ingram and Patai 1993.

2 On Hamilton’s fiction, Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira’s entry on Hamilton in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Biography remains the fullest record. Two of Hamilton’s early novels (Dead Yesterday, 1916; Follow My Leader, 1922) receive occasional attention in studies of women’s writing and the First World War (e.g. Ouditt 1994) or of 1920s socialist fiction (e.g. Klaus 1982 and Smith 1978).

3 Hamilton first ran for Parliament in 1924 as a Labour candidate but did not win.

4 In 1905 Hamilton married the economist C. J. Hamilton, a colleague at the University College of South Wales, Cardiff, where she taught briefly after completing her degree at Cambridge. See Ferreira 1999: 142 and Hamilton 1953: 25–6.

5 In Uphill All The Way Hamilton states: ‘I found myself happier and more at ease in the Labour Party, with its predominantly Trade Union membership, than I had, for long, been in the ILP, although I was nominated [as a candidate for Parliament] by that body’ (1953: 41).

6 It is worth noting that while studies of the ‘middlebrow’ have greatly expanded our map of interwar fiction, radical fiction of the period remains under-represented in critical scholarship.

7 The diary entry is dated Monday 3 March 1930.

8 The year is possibly 1923; Woolf’s diary records Hamilton as being among the guests during a weekend at Rodmell on 29 August of this year. Certainly, it is no earlier than August 1920 as the Woolfs took possession of Monk’s House at Rodmell on 1 September 1919.

9 Surprisingly, she makes no reference to her eleven-year association with Time and Tide.

10 Michael H. Whitworth notes that the TLS was ‘the most important of [Woolf’s] “patrons” from 1905 to 1923’ (2005: 88).

11 Romer Wilson was the pseudonym of British novelist Florence Wilson. Martin Schüler (1919) was her first novel.

12 I am indebted to Kathryn Laing for this suggestion. While Woolf’s composition of Night and Day predates most of the diary commentaries on Hamilton, the earliest of these (July 1918) was written a full four months before she completed a first draft of the manuscript which she continued revising until March 1919. See Whitworth 2005: 151.

13 Julia Briggs claims that ‘Mary Datchett is – to some extent – a portrait of Margaret Llewelyn Davies’ (2006: 92).

14 According to Banks, Hamilton’s commitment to feminism was ‘always a marginal one’ (1990: 91). Hamilton is not listed as an individual member in the institutional papers of the PSF, but her socialist convictions would have placed her in sympathy with what Sandra Stanley Holton has described as the ‘feminist-labour alliance’ at its heart (Jones 2016: 73). My thanks to Clara Jones for sharing the PSF records with me.

15 In her diary for the 1910s and 1920s Woolf repeatedly refers to Davies as ‘elderly’. Born in 1861 Davies was considerably older than Hamilton. In 1909 she would have been 48; Hamilton 25.

16 In a letter to Janet Case in 1910 Woolf described seeing ‘Miss LL. Davies at a lighted window in Barton St with all the conspirators round her’ (LI: 442) If this recollection informs the lighted window scene in Night and Day, it has been transposed from Westminster to the Strand and the subject represented as a writer and alone rather than in company.

17 To my knowledge there has been no critical discussion of this novel.

18 Part Two of Hamilton’s novel identifies ‘the General Election of 1905’ in the present moment, which is about five years on from events in Part One. This could be a misprint (there was no General Election in 1905). The LRC renamed itself the Labour Party after the 1906 election.

19 Beatrice and Sidney Webb were key figures in the Fabian Society which favoured progressivism and constitutional reform over revolution. At one point in Hamilton’s novel (255) a likeness is drawn between Wilfrid and two leading socialist figures of working-class representation, Keir Hardie and Tom Mann.

20 This personal drama begins with Wilfrid discarding Bridget for the conventionally pretty and feminine Iris Mauldeth whom he simultaneously robs from Roger.

21 Wilfrid won’t have people think of him as a poet and speaks of his poetry as ‘the best synthetic shorthand for ideas – that’s all’ (27).

22 This Fabian Society lecture was published in 1891 as The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

23 In his larger study, Ian Britain shows that Fabian socialism was in fact deeply rooted in aesthetic and cultural concerns (Britain 1982).

24 Review for Time and Tide in its issue of 9 Jan 1932. In the same review she identifies the Master Builder, commonly read as a symbolist play, as one of her favourites.

25 The WEA was founded in 1903 to extend education to adult members of the working class.

26 Miller argues that the emergence of a mass print industry was seen by many socialists to be a capitalist technology against which only radical periodicals addressed to a small-scale audience (what Miller terms ‘slow print’) were capable of generating a political counterpublic (Miller 2013).

27 Miller (ch. 2) discusses Shaw as a preeminent example of the socialist turn from the novel to drama.

28 For a recent discussion of this critically neglected playwright see Lufkin 2019. On the ‘Plays for a People’s Theatre’ series see Samuel et al. 1985: 24.

29 Time and Tide came to identify most strongly with the interests and concerns of an expanding group of middle-class professional women.

30 In this respect Time and Tide contrasts with one of its feminist predecessors, Dora Marsden’s more elitist Freewoman.

31 Hamilton wrote fortnightly book reviews for Time and Tide until the end of 1926 and remained among the paper’s regular reviewers on a near-monthly basis until the summer of 1931. In 1921 alone she reviewed more than one hundred books across thirty-six reviews, on one occasion reviewing as many as eight books in a single review.

32 Margaret Rhondda reported to Elizabeth Robins in July 1920 that Mrs Hamilton was to join the paper’s notes writers (unpublished correspondence, 27 July 1920). Elizabeth Robins Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

33 This series ran from 14 October to 25 November 1921 and included contributions from J. Ramsay MacDonald and Leonard Woolf as well as Hamilton who wrote on ‘The Labour Party in Power’. In the same year Hamilton published The Principles of Socialism with Notes for Lecturers and Class Leaders with the ILP.

34 This heading replaced ‘New Novels’ in December 1927.