‘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 Tidemany of them novelsand 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 twentiethcentury debates about modern fiction and, I argue, deserves recognition as an important woman radical of the interwar years.Writing in the book review columns of the feminist periodical Time and Tide, 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, in whatever medium he works, to leave them alone is ridiculous. The fact may have disastrous artistic reactions, but there it is. In so far as the novelist, in particular, is attempting to render the strange, irregular rhythm of lifeof contemporary lifehe must write about politics. (12 Nov 1920: 550) The review is printed under the heading 'Political Fiction' and is an articulate riposte to Roger Fry's famous statement that 'in art we have no … moral responsibility ' (1909: 15), an artificial separation of art and politics that was long definitional to our received understanding of Bloomsbury aesthetics and the artistic movement of modernism. More recently, Jessica Berman has challenged 'the distinction usually drawn between politically engaged writing and self-consciously aesthetic or experimental modernism' (2011: 9), a