‘Notebook Literature’: Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner

In February 1933, Virginia Woolf found herself ‘quivering’, ‘itching’ with anticipation at her next writing project, ‘the sequel’ to A Room of One's Own, for which she had ‘collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls’.¹ In three large notebooks compiled between 1931 and 1937, Woolf pasted newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, political pamphlets, handwritten and typewritten quotations, and other ephemera, testimonials of everyday life lived in early 20th-century Britain. The three now-crumbling scrapbooks that Woolf compiled in the 1930s speak eloquently to her methods. Covering her notebooks by hand with cloth and marbled paper, Woolf made detailed typed index pages for each volume and abbreviated handwritten indexes, which she pasted onto the top left-hand corner of each cover (see Figures 1 and 2). Inside these notebooks, clippings detailing university accounts appear side-by-side with letters asking for donations to women's colleges, while photographs of men in ceremonial and military garb jostle with quotations from ‘lectures by men’ on their ‘Hatred of w[omen]’, handwritten notes about women's access to abortion, men's opinions on women's smoking, nail polish and football, and newspaper cuttings quoting the speeches of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering.² Drawing on these ‘scrapbooks’ (as many scholars have come to call them) in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf would draw a line from the ‘tyrannies and servilities’ of the English private house to the toxic growth of fascism taking hold across both Europe and Britain in the 1930s, arguing that the germ of fascism could be found in British broadsheet newspapers as much as in the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini.³ For Woolf, women's position as ‘outsiders’ gave them a unique vantage point from which to criticise the reigning structures of capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power.⁴ For Woolf, keeping scrapbooks formed part of her own outsiders' experiment—an experiment not only in criticising capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power but also in imagining an alternative society freed from servility to (what she described as) the ‘manly satisfaction’ of war.⁵

In the years that Woolf was compiling her scrapbooks, the writer, educationist and soon-to-be psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, was preoccupied with her own project of keeping notebooks and diaries. In her notebooks from the 1930s, Milner recorded thoughts, desires, doodles, drawings and quotations, gathering up the raw material for the books that she would publish under the penname Joanna Field as A Life of One's Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In these books, Milner developed a ‘method’ for tracking her own wants, desires and interests, attempting to disentangle that vexed question of what a woman wants, from the pleasures imposed upon us by the outside world.⁶ And yet, in the course of her experiments, Milner found herself struggling to maintain a boundary between the inside and outside of the mind, harried (as she put it in her 1950 book On Not Being Able to Paint) by ‘monsters’ both ‘within and without’.⁷

The intersections between Milner's and Woolf's lives and writing are intriguing. What I want to focus on in this essay, however, is how Woolf and Milner used, and wrote about, scrapbooking and notebook-keeping as part of a creative and critical experiment in responding to the political challenges of the 1930s. Anticipating Doris Lessing's 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook (which I turn to at the end of this essay), both Woolf's and Milner's experiments with scrapbooks, notebooks and diaries draw attention to the intimate connections between women's personal and political lives, and they also explore the creative and critical possibilities of the position of the ‘outsider’.¹⁵ For both Woolf and Milner, keeping notebooks was part of a creative experiment in wrestling women's critical and creative agency back from dominant, and, in some cases, even fascistic, narratives of virile male action. For both writers, however, their experiments with what Woolf herself described (in an essay on Kipling) as ‘notebook literature’ also brought about difficult encounters with the various ‘monsters’ (to borrow Milner's term) that haunted 1930s Europe and Britain.¹⁶ Although both Woolf and Milner celebrate the creative and critical potential of keeping notebooks, their experiments with remaining on the ‘outside’ also present both themselves and us with the limitations of thinking about modernism as a literature of outsiders.¹⁷ In their experiments with notebook-keeping, both Woolf and Milner track the ‘monsters’ that migrate across the borders of minds and nations, revealing not only the creative and critical possibilities but also some of the impossibilities of the position of the outsider.

In Britain in the early 1930s, as Jessica Berman has pointed out, fascism appeared quite literally under the promise of a new kind of ‘action’.¹⁸ In 1931, Oswald Mosley and Harold Nicolson formed their ‘New Party’ and published an associated journal titled Action. Summing up their discontent with the National Coalition government, Mosley's and Nicolson's editorial presented a portrait of a nation in ‘dire straits’, as Berman summarises it, ‘lethargic to its very core’.¹⁹ As an antidote to political stasis and inertia, the New Party promised the opposite: virile, masculine action. ‘The nation’, wrote Mosley, who would later go on to found the British Union of Fascists, ‘demands action’.²⁰

In both the diary entry and in Between the Acts, the image of the snake growing ‘sick of the crushed toad’ captures feelings of stasis, uncertainty and looming threat. In the diary entry, her country idyll overshadowed by the threat of fascism both at home and abroad, Woolf finds that, struggling with The Years as she already is, she cannot write—the sight of the snake gorging on the toad shadows into the darkly ominous dream of ‘men committing suicide’. In the novel, the image appears to Giles as an image of ‘birth the wrong way round—a monstrous inversion’, not only evoking the feelings of stasis that pervade Between the Acts but also suggesting the forms of political monstrosity that lie just off-stage throughout the novel.²⁵ And yet the violent ‘action’ that Giles finds so satisfying is also typical of the forms of masculinity that Woolf viewed as the ‘germ’ of fascism in both Britain and Europe.²⁶

In Three Guineas, Woolf exhorted women to turn their backs on the calls to action that resounded across Europe in the late 1930s. Rejecting the calls to ‘action’ advocated by the anti-fascist organisations of which she was nonetheless an ambivalent member, and spurning patriotic appeals to support military action, Woolf encouraged women—and other ‘outsiders’—to treat such summons with ‘indifference’.²⁷ Reflecting on the ‘facts’ surrounding women's ‘outsider’ status in Britain in 1938, Woolf argued that the outsider had ‘no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our” country’, a country that, as Woolf pointed out, had ‘for the greater part of its history’ treated women as ‘slave[s]’.²⁸ Faced with patriotic arguments in favour of war, Woolf argued that women must practice a form of ‘indifference’, announcing famously that ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’²⁹ For Woolf, women's historical exclusion from sites of masculine power allowed them to ‘see the same world’, but ‘through different eyes’, offering them a unique critical perspective on the close connection between imperialist militant masculinity and fascist ideology.³⁰ Responding to the barrister's invitation to join a ‘society […] whose aim is to preserve peace’, Woolf argued that women must reject appeals to join in men's societies (even those in favour of peace) and instead form an alternative society, a ‘Society of Outsiders’.³¹

For Woolf, a conscious ‘indifference’ to patriotic and patriarchal appeals to military and other forms of political action was by no means a form of inaction. From the position of ‘indifference’, Woolf argues, ‘certain actions must follow’.³² As Berman argues, Woolf's writing stages her own attempt to intervene in, disrupt and reinvent the fascist discourse of action that had emerged in Britain in the early 1930s. For Berman (writing of The Waves), Woolf ‘creates an alternative discourse of feminist action and power, one which seeks to intervene directly in the political life of Britain’.³³

Throughout Three Guineas, Woolf searches for and advocates what she calls an ‘active method’ of ‘expressing our belief that war is barbarous, that war is inhuman, that war […] is insupportable, horrible and beastly’.³⁴ For those who make up Woolf's ‘Society of Outsiders’, the task is to reject the ‘unreal loyalties’, the conscious and unconscious ties that bind both men and women into the traditions of the patriarchal system.³⁵ Women, and outsiders, Woolf argues, must develop ‘not merely critical but creative’ ‘experiments’ in living life outside of the ‘vicious circle’ of patriarchal, capitalist and fascist power.³⁶ For Woolf, the Society of Outsiders makes itself felt in concrete examples of women refusing to prop up the ideological and material machinery of war—from the Mayoress of Woolwich who ‘made a courageous and effective experiment in the prevention of war by not knitting socks’ to the women undertaking an ‘experiment in passivity’ by not going to church.³⁷ But Three Guineas also advocates an experimental creative and critical response to the latent fascism of English patriarchal culture that is rooted in Woolf's own practice of making scrapbooks.

For Woolf, the scrapbook method of copying, cutting, pasting and comparing helped her not only to reveal the interwoven effects of capitalism and misogyny in shaping women's lives but also to expose the links between patriarchal gate-keeping in 1930s Britain and the policing of strict gender roles in Nazi and Fascist Europe. In Three Guineas, Woolf draws on her scrapbooks to stage her own experimental intervention in the culture of the 1930s, not only offering a strident critique of the links between English patriarchal culture and fascist ideology but also making a powerful case for women's—and other outsiders'—capacity to find alternative forms of creative action.⁵³

Milner framed both Life and Experiment not as self-help, autobiography or even self-analysis but, instead, as a new ‘method’—a ‘method’ of diary-keeping and self-observation that she offered to her reader as a way of freeing himself or herself from the ‘borrowed mass-produced ideal[s]’ thrust upon us in capitalist modernity.⁵⁶ For Milner, in the 1930s, her ‘method’ of diary-keeping, free writing, doodling and drawing in notebooks became a vital means of extricating the individual mind from the ready-made wants and desires forced upon us in the modern world. This was also a method that, Milner hoped, she might make ‘available for anyone, quite apart from whether opportunity or intellectual capacity inclined them to the task of wading through psycho-analytic literature or their income made it possible for them to submit themselves as a patient’.⁵⁷ Like Woolf, whose book The Common Reader, is listed in Milner's notebooks as one of a number of books that ‘need to [be] consider[ed] […] as part of one's own experience’, Milner is inspired by a democratic impulse that lies at the heart of her project.⁵⁸ This was, she wrote, ‘an attempt to find a method by which the ordinary man can be himself, not dependent on experts’—‘They will hate this, the experts’, she added.⁵⁹

In Three Guineas, Woolf challenged women to reject the ‘unreal loyalties’, the conscious and unconscious ties that bound men and women into the patriarchal traditions of the past.⁶⁰ Criticising what she called the ‘prostituted culture and intellectual slavery’ of the modern press and publishing industry, Woolf encouraged women, and other outsiders, to strive instead for ‘a mind of your own and a will of your own’.⁶¹ In her early writings, Milner pursues a similarly modernist attempt to free herself from ‘influence from custom, tradition, fashion’, refusing to be ‘swayed by standards uncritically accepted from my friends, my family, my countrymen, my ancestors’.⁶²

Although Khan is writing about Milner's clinical notes (including her patient's drawings), his description of the mass of ‘bits and pieces of written stuff, drawings, etc’, ‘written over in all directions, upside down and sideways with a particular bias towards illegibility’, also offers a vivid insight into Milner's own personal archive. Speculating, in Life, about the possibility of ‘apply[ing] the methods of experiment’ to track down her own ‘private reality’, Milner comments that she ‘must have known vaguely what lay ahead of me, for I still have a crumpled piece of paper with a quotation which I had copied out, and which I now remember carrying about in my pocket at this time’.⁶⁶ Hinting at the enormous difficulties of Milner's endeavour, the quotation (from Woolf's essay on Montaigne) describes the elusive, discordant and shifting nature of the soul—‘so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life in merely trying to run her to earth’.⁶⁷ In Milner's archive, such ‘crumpled piece[s] of paper’ abound (see Figures 4 and 6), but we can also see the attentiveness with which she used her ‘method’ to return to and work over old diaries, notes and notebooks with a pen or pencil in hand, tracking her own wants, desires and interests as they criss-cross the page, selecting diary entries, passages of free writing, moments, doodles, drawings and quotations for inclusion and analysis in her published books. A set of notes held together with a paperclip, dated 2/12/31, and headed ‘Present Problem & Women's Work. FINDING a separate self’ (see Figure 4) also includes the later annotation ‘To be used—July 1935’, while on the cover of a notebook marked ‘Sept 21^st 1928’ (see Figure 5), Milner has added in pen and circled ‘Dealt with March 1933’. Throughout the notebooks and diaries, passages are marked in pencil or pen for inclusion or discussion in ‘M.O.’ and ‘M.O.2’ (her shorthand for the books that would become Life and Experiment; see Figure 6). In the published books, Milner shares these (sometimes edited) extracts from her notebooks and diaries, alongside a collage of aphoristic, literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic and other quotations, in a manner that is itself typical of the overlapping genres of the commonplace book, the scrapbook and the self-help manual, raiding eclectic, and often non-academic, sources for wisdom on how to preserve a life of one's own amidst the shifting currents of the crowd.⁶⁸

Milner's diaries may appear in contrast to the more impersonal and critical encounter with history that we find in Woolf's Three Guineas scrapbooks. And yet, I want to suggest, these two writers had a common aim in the 1930s: developing and championing a creative and critical form of ‘notebook literature’ for outsiders. In her scrapbooks, Woolf developed a model of the outsider as a critical and creative interpreter of her culture, copying, cutting and pasting fragments of newspaper clippings, memoirs, letters, pamphlets and other ephemera into hand-covered notebooks in order to reveal the connections between patriarchal structures in Britain and the ideologies underpinning European fascism. Woolf's scrapbooks—unlike either her personal diaries or her reading notebooks—contain very few passages of her own writing and include very little annotation of the scrapbook entries themselves.⁶⁹ But the traces of her efforts to organise and arrange the material are apparent throughout—from Woolf's typically attentive decoration of the shop-bought notebooks to the careful arrangement and juxtaposition of images and text and the detailed typed indexes to each volume. In Milner's published books, although she offers glimpses into her personal life and struggles as a working woman, a mother and a divorcee, the books are framed not as autobiographical narratives but rather as attempts to share a creative and critical ‘method’ for freeing both body and mind from the restrictive forces of modern life. For both Milner and Woolf, keeping notebooks, diaries and scrapbooks was part of an experiment that they offered up to their own readers as a unique creative and critical ‘method’ for finding individual agency amidst the swaying currents of the crowd.

In the 1930s, both Woolf and Milner advocated forms of creative and critical experiment as the outsider's response to mass modernity and to the rise of fascism both at home and abroad. In Experiment, Milner's anxiety about the proximity between her own fascination with pagan rituals of self-abandonment and the Nazi iconography of Wagnerian pagan gods is palpable, but she also insists that her ‘method’ of creative experiment with notebooks, diaries, free drawings and self-observation is itself a way of distinguishing between ‘inner facts’ and the ‘lies of atrocity-mongers’.¹⁰¹ In Life, Experiment and On Not Being Able to Paint, Milner offers a compelling account of personal creative experiment and critical self-observation as a vital part of (what she calls) an ‘education for a democracy’.¹⁰² In Three Guineas, Woolf encourages women to ‘experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private’, arguing that ‘Those experiments will not be merely critical but creative’.¹⁰³ And yet both Woolf and Milner remain wary of any overly romantic vision of the artist as outsider, drawing attention to the difficulty and perhaps even impossibility of keeping sharp boundaries between the inside and the outside of self and culture. Like Anna Wulf, who finds that her attempt to use notebooks to insert firm boundaries between her personal life and her political life breaks down, for Milner and Woolf too, their experiments with scrapbooks and notebooks reveal the messy entanglement of personal and political life. In The Golden Notebook, the sprawling and overlapping notebooks repeatedly expose the conflict between Anna's outwardly liberatory political stance as a ‘free woman’ and her frequently ugly (often sexist, racist and homophobic) inner thoughts, feelings and desires. In a similar way, both Woolf and Milner struggle to maintain the boundaries that they attempt to insert between the inner life of the ‘outsider’ and the outside world. Although both Woolf and Milner offer powerful arguments for the radical creative possibilities of living life on the ‘outside’, they also acknowledge the immense difficulty, and indeed impossibility, of ever truly extricating a ‘mind of one's own’ from the culture in which one lives.