Introduction: The Interwar Woman Writer: Politics and Aesthetics

Abstract

This special issue is prompted by a concern to probe the ways in which the claims of literary and political engagement were mutually constitutive for interwar women writers. These women lived through two rounds of electoral reform in 1918 and later in 1928, the opening up of the professions to some women through the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, the reform of divorce law in 1924 and 1937, as well as significant socio-political upheaval, including the first Labour government in 1924 and the 1926 General Strike. As they wrote novels, tracts and pamphlets, women writers assumed a wide range of official roles that were informed by the shifting political world in which they found themselves: Winifred Holtby was a member of the Six Point Group and Independent Labour Party; Sylvia Townsend Warner was a committed communist; Naomi Mitchison stood as Labour candidate for the Scottish Universities seat in 1935; Virginia Woolf had a life-long affiliation to the Women’s Co-operative Guild; Storm Jameson was a co-founder member of the Peace Pledge Union. The essays in this issue draw attention to the nuances of the political commitments of interwar women writers and their writing as a site of reflection on these commitments. The introduction situates this edited collection in terms of recent developments in modernist and middlebrow studies and provides summaries for the chapters that follow.

Keywords:

• politics and aesthetics
• the woman writer
• political activism
• Winifred Holtby
• Virginia Woolf

In a letter to Lady Rhondda in December 1933, Winifred Holtby wrote: ‘I shall never quite make up my mind whether to be a reformer-sort-of-person or a writer-sort-of-person’, and earlier that same year she described herself in another letter to Phyllis Bentley as ‘50% a politician’ (Shaw 1999: 233–4). Holtby’s indecision (‘I shall never quite make up my mind’) and her use of quantitative values that suggest statistical precision (‘50%’) demonstrate an urgent need to articulate the relative claims of her relationship to literary writing and political activism. The letters suggest that, for Holtby, the roles of writer and reformer are assumed identities (‘sort-of-person’) and indicate the vicissitudes in the relationship between writing and politics as she explores different ways to articulate her commitments.

Holtby was not alone in her examination of the relative weight of the political and the aesthetic in her identity as a writer. Preoccupied by this question herself, Holtby was skilled at examining these claims in the work of others. It formed a point of interest for her 1932 study of Virginia Woolf. Woolf undermined Holtby’s study as ‘a painstaking effort rather to clear up her own muddles that to get the hang of mine’ (L6 p. 380–1) and, rather disingenuously, given Woolf’s own fine appreciation of the fluctuations of the self, suggested that she did not get at the ‘true Virginia’ in her work. Indeed, Holtby’s book does reveal a good deal about her own writerly preoccupations, but she is also alert to the political dimensions of Woolf’s writing: she praised Woolf’s work for her consciousness of ‘where politics and aesthetics meet’ and suggested that in ‘A Room of One’s Own and her introduction to Life As We Have Known It […] [Woolf has] recognised the humble foundations from which great literatures rise’ (Holtby 2007: 51, 52).

Holtby’s articulation of writer and reformer as separate identities in her letter to Lady Rhondda suggest a need to separate out these categories. Although she acknowledges the point ‘where politics and aesthetics meet’ in Woolf’s work as she examines Woolf’s focus on the material basis of literary production in A Room of One’s Own and in the ‘Introductory Letter’, Holtby returns to a model which separates the literary from the political. She examines The Waves and the ‘Introductory Letter’ as ‘two revealingly diverse pieces of work’, describing the former as Woolf’s ‘most delicate, complex and aesthetically pure piece of writing’ and the latter as her ‘furthest excursion into political writing’ (Holtby 2007: 186). Woolf was, however, working on both projects simultaneously and the two do not separate so easily into the categories to which Holtby assigns them. The content of Woolf’s argument in the ‘Introductory Letter’ demonstrates her sensitivity to ‘the humble foundations from which great literature springs’, as Holtby suggests, but Woolf renders her negotiation of political concerns through aesthetic manipulation, while The Waves emerges from a period where Woolf was scrutinizing issues of class and voice (Periyan 2018a; Jones 2014). Indeed, in The Waves, the potent symbol of a figure that Bernard refers to as ‘the woman writing’ seems to be an image of aesthetic removal, but the text impels a consciousness of the material conditions that underpin this aesthetic removal (Woolf 2000: 186). This figure is repeatedly framed in class-inflected terms as a ‘lady’ and her literary activity is consistently juxtaposed with working-class labour to signal the ways in which literary production is enabled by the class system: ‘“I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping”, said Susan’ (8); ‘the old image—the gardeners sweeping, the lady writing—returned’ (152); ‘I […] saw the lady writing and the gardeners with their great brooms’ (108). Woolf’s 1936 essay for the Daily Worker, ‘Why Art follows Politics’, articulates the concerns of the time in defending writers’ political involvements: ‘With all these voices crying and conflicting in his ears, how can the artist still remain at peace in his studio contemplating his model or his apple in the cold light that comes through the studio window?’ (Woolf 2008: 215). She concludes that the writer cannot—and the way out she sees is by organizational, collective action in societies like the Artists International Association. The masculine inflection of this article stands in tension with Woolf’s commitment to women’s literary production in A Room of One’s Own and, perhaps, offers a reflection of Woolf’s perception of the male readership of the Daily Worker. Although Woolf inflects the writer as masculine in this article, Woolf was a member of a very similar organization to the one she identified; as David Bradshaw has examined, Woolf, alongside Rosamond Lehmann and Rose Macaulay was involved in the association ‘For Intellectual Liberty’ (Bradshaw 1997, 1998).

The need to address a masculine reader—and indeed writer—in probing the social engagements of literary writers is an issue to which Storm Jameson was sensitive. Jameson was acutely conscious of the ways in which literary ambitions might impinge upon socially informed writing. After reviewing George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier in the May 1937 issue of Fact, and observing the presence of his own perspective in the text, Jameson explored and defined the genre of the ‘document’ in a subsequent issue of the journal in July: ‘The instinct which drives a writer to go and see for himself may be sound […] he must be able to give an objective report […] [w]ithout feeling heroic, or even adventurous, or curious about their own spiritual reactions’ (Jameson 1937). Jameson impresses upon the male writer the need to subsume his ego, but her slippage between gender pronouns—from the masculine inflected terms ‘himself’ and ‘heroic’ to the gender neutral ‘their’—implies an awareness that women may have different access to different literary genres. And different genres and audiences also impelled different forms of political allegiance. Recent work has focussed on Woolf’s vexed but enduring relationship to political activism and how this was written into a variety of her fictional and non-fictional texts (Jones 2016). Political commitments could be as mutable as the literary forms through which they were fashioned, and the audiences to which they were addressed. This mutability is signalled by Woolf’s later revisiting of the class allegiances she claimed in her introduction to Life As We Have Known It in her lecture to the Workers’ Educational Association, apparently shifting her allegiance from the middle to the working class (Periyan 2018b: 175). Different publication outlets and different kinds of work allowed for a constant shifting of the balance of the political and aesthetic in ways that Holtby’s compartmentalised approach does not acknowledge.

Interwar women assumed the mantle of ‘writer’ with some degree of awe and trepidation. Vera Brittain wrote to Winifred Holtby after graduating from Oxford to report a conversation with her former teacher who suggested that rather than taking up a career in teaching the women ‘are very wise to refuse the “safe” jobs […] until we have first tried the literary work we prefer’ (Brittain and Handley-Taylor 1960: 9). For others the literary world was associated with an idyll. Ellen Wilkinson remembered herself ‘completely happy’ during the eight weeks it took to write her novel Clash and appears to subscribe to a fantasy of a literary life: ‘I believe that the deepest impulse in each one of us […] is the impulse to create’. Her ‘parliamentary life’, by comparison, is ‘unsatisfactory’ and ‘scrappy’ (Wilkinson 1929). Literary forms were increasingly understood as socially determined in the 1930s, with competitions in the Left Review for working-class writers organized by Amabel Williams-Ellis and articles in the Workers’ Educational Association journal, The Highway, calling for the working-class literary production that Woolf demonstrated an awareness of in ‘The Leaning Tower’, but already in the 1920s Ellen Wilkinson found a way to reconcile two aspects of her work that she considered very different in nature. In an article in Plebs titled ‘Literature of the Job’ Wilkinson calls for a ‘class literature’, suggesting an attempt to reconcile her literary and political careers but also demonstrating that the literary and political cannot be understood as a duality, but rather an interlocking and dialogic relationship, as Anna Snaith’s analysis of Woolf’s literary style has suggested (Snaith 2000: 116).

This special issue is prompted by a concern to probe the ways in which the claims of literary and political engagement were mutually constitutive for interwar women writers, who, by the 1930s, were substantially shaping intellectual culture (Ewins 2019). These women lived through two rounds of electoral reform in 1918 and later in 1928, the opening up of the professions to some women through the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, the reform of divorce law in 1924 and 1937, as well as significant socio-political upheaval, including the first Labour government in 1924 and the 1926 General Strike. As they wrote novels, tracts and pamphlets, women writers assumed a wide range of official roles that were informed by the shifting political world in which they found themselves: Winifred Holtby was a member of the Six Point Group and Independent Labour Party and campaigned for the National Union for Women Teachers and Union for Democratic Control; Sylvia Townsend Warner was a committed communist and a Red Cross volunteer in Spain during the Civil War; Naomi Mitchison stood as Labour candidate for the Scottish Universities seat in 1935; Virginia Woolf had a life-long affiliation to the Women’s Co-operative Guild; Storm Jameson was a co-founder member of the Peace Pledge Union; Rosamond Lehmann was an anti-fascist organizer and speaker; Elizabeth Bowen and E. M. Delafield were long-term presidents of their local WIs. These affiliations were frequently complicated. The ways in which Woolf’s class feeling complicated her political ideals is well known. But she was not the only one. In 1934, Vera Brittain, a committed member of the Labour Party, recognized in a letter to Holtby that she was ‘not really a good democrat’ (Brittain and Handley-Taylor 1960: 273).

Based on a symposium held at King’s College London in June 2018, this special issue showcases the diverse approaches being taken to the politics of interwar women writers right now. It opens with Catherine Clay’s essay on Labour politician and novelist Mary Agnes Hamilton. Hamilton is a figure from this period who has been almost entirely forgotten but whose dual commitments to literature and politics make her totemic for this special issue. Representative of a generation of professionalised woman writers, the essay opens with an account of Hamilton’s prolific career as a journalist and the ways in which her professional status both appealed to and repelled her acquaintance, Virginia Woolf. Clay reads Hamilton as a contributor to contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and politics, situating her both as an interlocutor for critics of the novel within the Labour movement and as answering back to the argument for aesthetic containment historically associated with Bloomsbury modernism. Matthew Taunton’s essay that follows also repositions a writer once considered marginal at the heart of contemporary socio-political debates, making the case for Katharine Burdekin as a ‘novelist of ideas’. Focusing on her deployment of collective speech in three 1930s novels, Taunton draws attention to Burdekin’s trenchant engagement with liturgical debates that stretch back to the English Reformation. By tracing the development in Burdekin’s presentation of speaking in unison, Taunton is able to locate a shift in her thinking about the relationship between the individual and community as the thirties wore on and the threat of Nazism increasingly challenged the efficacy of a position of ‘unselfish individualism’.

Suzanne Hobson tackles similar questions relating to the individual and social change in her essay on the political thought and fiction of Naomi Mitchison. The essay explores Mitchison’s involvement with the Rationalist Press Association, in particular her critical position on the left of debates about the future of the organization in the 1930s. Through a reading of Mitchison’s politically-inflected engagement with Christianity in her historical novel The Blood of the Martyrs, Hobson suggests Mitchison found aspects of Christian collectivism that might rejuvenate a moribund and right-leaning rationalism and so form a new moral basis for collective thought and action.

Kate Macdonald’s essay on Rose Macaulay’s dislike of domesticity probes one writer’s resistance to social convention in detail. Focusing on Macaulay’s interwar journalism, Macdonald discusses the ways in which this output queried traditional models of femininity and highlighted ‘domesticity’ as a political category. While Macaulay’s frankness about the oppressive nature of domestic space and its associated practices was unusual for such a high profile writer, Macdonald stresses that her ‘dislike’ of doing housework herself did not lead her to question middle-class women’s dependence on the domestic labour of others—far from it. Nicola Wilson takes up the class dynamics of interwar domesticity in her essay on working-class novelist and Labour activist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Focusing on Carnie Holdsworth’s 1924 novel General Belinda, based on her popular serial in co-operative periodical The Wheatsheaf, Wilson draws attention not only to the novel’s classed critique of domestic service as a profession but the degree to which the author’s co-operative and pacifist values galvanize this critique. Wilson argues that in General Belinda Carnie Holdsworth weaponises a comic version of domestic service familiar to readers of P. G. Wodehouse, repurposing generic convention to her own political ends. Such formal self-consciousness is, Alice Wood argues, in evidence in articles about women and shopping by Storm Jameson, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping magazine in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These articles critique the consumer culture propagated and promoted by the magazine within its very pages, adopting the advertorial language of compulsion and desire in order to satirize the conspicuous consumption upon which capitalism thrives.

We are privileged that the issue closes with an afterword reflecting on twenty years of work on interwar women writers by pioneer of the field, Maroula Joannou. We are not the first people to draw attention to the political commitments of interwar women writers and this introduction is an opportunity to name the feminist literary scholars to whom we owe much: Mary Joannou, Janet Montefiore, Elizabeth Maslen, Jane Dowson and Pamela Fox (Dowson 1995; Joannou 1995; Montefiore 1996; Maslen 2001; Fox 1994). We do claim that the essays collected here are reflective of certain developments in the field. Written under the influence of an invigorated periodical studies and an organizational turn in modernist studies, this research brings new attention to the specificities of women writers’ practical political commitments and the range of their cultural production.

This special issue would not be possible without the recuperative work conducted in the field of middlebrow studies. Essential research by individual scholars, Nicola Beauman, Nicola Humble, Faye Hammill (Beauman 1978; Humble 2001; Hammill 2007) and in the form of edited collections (Deen 2002), has drawn attention to women writers whose generic preferences, subject matter and readerships left them, as Hapgood and Paxton suggest, ‘outside modernism’ (Hapgood and Paxton 2000). Claiming space for women writing in mid-status genres has challenged the orthodox ‘great divide’ narrative of the literary culture of the period and complicated our sense of the lines across which this culture was stratified. The urgency of this critical project, in which questions of literary value and legitimacy are at stake, means that middlebrow studies has tended to focus on the operations and exclusionary manoeuvres of cultural hierarchies and the ways in which writers are positioned in, and themselves negotiated, the literary marketplace. Here, we take inspiration from aspects of middlebrow studies whilst also shifting the terms of the critical debate, suggesting that what these women writers had in common was a set of political and social interests.

What has looked to us like an organizational turn in modernist studies in recent years comes into play here too, and we are inspired by new research focusing on the political activism and social commitments of writers working in the interwar period. So far the emphasis has tended to fall on male writers of the left or discussion geared towards definitional questions (see Kohlmann 2014; Ferrall and McNeill 2015; Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015). The symposium on which this collection is based was partly motivated by our mutual concern that women writers’ political practice in their lives and their contribution to political debates in their writing not be overlooked. In this we carry on the work of scholars like Joannou, Montefiore and Dowson and, more recently, Kristin Ewins on the politics of women’s writing in the 1930s (see Ewins 2015, 2019). While this decade—and the meanings that it has accrued—remains essential to and enabling of the insights of a number of the essays gathered here, we are also committed to working with the full span of the interwar period. Doing so allows us, for instance, to challenge any version of the twenties as a moment of less fully formed commitments compared to the ‘committed’ thirties. Catherine Clay’s essay reveals that the questions of authorial responsibility, more often identified with the thirties, were in fact already being rehearsed and debated early in the previous decade. The relationship between politics and aesthetics and the weighting of and tension between these dual commitments as they were experienced by women writers of the interwar period is at the heart of this special issue.

Disclosure Statement

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