‘Her Heritage Was that Tragic Optimism’: Edwardian Pastoral

George Orwell suggested that proletarian literature began before the First World War when Ford Madox Ford, the editor of the English Review, met D.H. Lawrence and saw in him the portent of a new class finding expression in literature. Chapter one of this book explores the extent to which Ford was already anticipating the ideas of William Empson in his Edwardian pastoral, which is seen as a mode of discourse concerned with rethinking social relations and a key progenitor of both modernism and proletarian literature. The chapter also discusses Ford and H.G. Wells as uneasy collaborators in ‘music-hall’ modernism and analyses the urban explorations of both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

‘She Had Finished with Men Forever’: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite

This chapter-length close reading of Grey Granite, the third volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, considers how he set out consciously to probe the limits of modernist technique by bringing it into conjunction with a fully industrialised social life. The result was not the ‘revolutionary’ perspective of the working class that Gibbon’s peers such as James Barke and Hugh MacDiarmid demanded and it has become a commonplace ever since for male critics of the left to fault Gibbon for ‘lack of engagement with urban working-class lives’. This chapter counters this view with a close reading of the novel focusing on the central female character, Chris Guthrie, drawing particularly on the work of feminist critics (including Jenny Wolmark, Deirdre Burton, Glenda Norquay, Alison Lumsden and Margery Palmer McCulloch) to show how by identifying with female subjectivity, Gibbon found an answer to both the proletarian question of how to express a post-capitalist culture and the modernist question of how to identify a collective that would support a liberated identity.

Introduction

The introduction defines and contextualises what William Empson called ‘the popular, vague, but somehow obvious, idea of proletarian literature’. After discussing various theories of proletarian literature, including Empson’s conception of it as a version of pastoral, it is analysed in terms of a complex intersectional relationship between gender and class and illustrated by a case study of Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned. The second half of the introduction begins with a detailed reception history of proletarian literature before going on to discuss the relationship between proletarian literature and modernism. The final section lays out the argument of the book and argues that the key orientation of proletarian modernist writing is to the future rather than the past.

‘None of That “My Good Woman” Stuff’: Outsider Observations

This chapter analyses texts such as Virginia Woolf’s introductory letter to Life as We Have Known It, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (and its influence in the 1950s), John Sommerfield’s Trouble in Porter Street, Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge’s Britain by Mass Observation and Naomi Mitchison’s Among You Taking Notes, in an investigation of the destinations of the proletarian-modernist trajectory from the late 1930s and on through the Second World war and into the postwar welfare state. In particular, the respective works of Woolf and Mitchison are analysed as attempts to resolve the ‘modernist question’ of the relationship between the individual and the collective by rethinking the relationship between the public and private spheres to produce feminist counter-public spheres that can be seen as versions of ‘proletarian literature’ that were not dependent on the patriarchal structures that were often found in male socialist organisations.

Conclusion

The conclusion considers the various legacies of proletarian modernism and the structures of feeling it supported, including the equalities legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, and the promotion of self-reflexivity in the private sphere. It is argued that focusing on this kind of intersectional proletarian literature might provide a good direction for the future of modernist studies and a means for preserving and channelling the energy and radical analyses which have given the New Modernist Studies momentum over the last fifteen years or so into a wider-ranging, democratic and more global public engagement with everyday culture. It is argued that the possible futures imagined by the modernist-proletarian texts considered in this book far exceed the capacity of state infrastructure and mainstream political imagination. The conclusion also calls for a reinterpretation of literary history to focus on subjectivity, intersubjectivity and desire in relation to everyday life, which would have real-world consequences through its relevance to an intersectional approach to politics.

‘The Raw Material of History’: John Sommerfield’s May Day

Chapter 4 is an extended close reading of John Sommerfield’s experimental proletarian novel May Day, which can be seen as an attempt to both prove the utility of modernist techniques – drawing in particular on the work of Virginia Woolf – for communist ends as well as demonstrating what a communist perspective offers modernist techniques. Sommerfield employs Woolf’s techniques to focus on the seemingly-random connections thrown up by capitalist social relations surrounding the production process and thus sets out an opposition between the concrete possibilities offered by modern intersubjective networks and the barriers set to those by the capitalist framework within which everyone is imprisoned (the upper-class as much as the working-class characters). A significant aspect of his approach lies in his focus on working-class women ranging from married mother, Martine Seton, to the Work’s manager’s mistress, Jenny Hardy, and the Communist activist, Ivy Cutford. Sommerfield is shown to be fundamentally concerned with how to replicate the successful incorporation of female unconsciousness and sexuality by individualist modernist novels into a collectivist novel concerned with society as a whole.

‘The Common Life’: Women and Men after the General Strike

This chapter draws on the argument of Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill that the message of the defeat of the 1926 General Strike was the need to fuse political and sexual desire into ‘a new politicised and gendered imagination for struggles to come’. An extended close reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its earlier drafts focuses on Lawrence’s sustained attempt to reimagine gender and class relations. This is followed by the discussion of a number of proletarian novels, such as Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash, Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man, Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, Harold Heslop’s Last Cage Down and James Barke’s Major Operation, in terms of how they reconcile sexual, gender and class politics.