“Forebodings about fascism”: Marion Milner and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In A Life of One 's Own (1934) Marion Milner asked the apparently simple question: "What do I like?" By 1937, however, when Milner published An Experiment in Leisure, the question "What do I like?", and the urgency of answering it, had shifted. Writing against the backdrop of a rising current of fascism across Europe, there was a new urgency for Milner, in 1937, in understanding the apparent ease with which, not only Hollywood movie-makers, but now also European dictators might manipulate individual desires. Focusing on portraits of reading from Virginia Woolf's 1937 novel, The Years, alongside Milner's 1937 An Experiment in Leisure, this article explores Woolf's and Milner's shared-and deeply anxious-fascination with what Milner described, in her 1950 book On Not Being Able to Paint, as the "Monsters within and without." This article tracks Woolf's and Milner's encounters with the internal and external "monsters" haunting 1930s Europe, showing how, for both writers, the historical vicissitudes of fascism traversed the terrains of psychic, cultural, and political life. Both Woolf and Milner, I argue, were engaged in an endeavor to understand the entanglement of the psychic, social and political forces at work in our everyday acts of leisure and reading.

‘A reasonably sheltered position’: Marion Milner, David Jones, and the location of art writing

“…80 The imperative not to project monsters outward strongly resonates with a situation in which whole groups of people were demonised by Fascist dictators (a context which Helen Tyson has recently explored in relation to both Milner and Woolf's work). 81 Here, it seems that Milner's inclusion of a place name in her text is not accidental. Thorney Isle became an RAF military base in 1938.…”

‘Action […] real and effective’: Marion Milner and ‘Expressive Action’

“…19 Not only is it clear that Milner read Woolf's writing, but, as I have argued elsewhere, in the 1930s both writers shared a deep preoccupation with the 'monsters' encroaching in both Europe and Britain. 20 In the trio of books that arise from her experiments with creativity in the 1930s and 40s -A Life of One's Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure (1937), and On Not Being Able to Paint (1950) -Milner charts her 'forebodings about fascism' and offers an intriguing 'method' for creative living as a means of extricating the individual mind from the rising currents of fascism. 21 In these writings, Milner, like Woolf, stages an intervention in her society's reverence for the 'man of action', constructing a model of creative life as an alternative form of what she refers to as 'expressive' or 'contemplative' (rather than 'purposive') 'action'.…”