Andrew Harrison: Anne Fernihough, Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism

Summary

In this engaging and wide-ranging work of literary historiography, Anne Fernihough sets out to revise prevailing images of the Edwardian period as characterised by ‘a “golden afternoon” calm’, ‘dull materialism’ or ‘anxiety and uncertainty’, instead emphasising ‘a utopian, hyperindividualist strand within pre-war intellectual culture that had a farreaching impact on literature and literary theory both before and after the war’ (32). She does this by concentrating on the forward- looking aube-de-siècle debates staged in the pages of two influential weekly papers, the New Age and the Freewoman (later retitled the New Freewoman and then the Egoist). Fernihough explores how these publications were shaped by the radical socialist and feminist views of their first editors, A. R. Orage and Dora Marsden, but also included counter-voices challenging their own changing political and intellectual commitments.

Orage's outlook was initially aligned with an anarchistic brand of ‘ideal socialism’ ‘concerned more with personal liberty and spiritual growth than with economics and the elimination of poverty’ (4). In his opening editorial in the New Age on 2 May 1907, Orage dismissed ‘statistical classifications and sociological formulae’ in favour of ‘the intensification of life’ and ‘the creation of a race of supremely and progressively intelligent beings’ (5). Likewise, in the first issue of the Freewoman, dated 23 November 1911, Marsden espoused an antisuffragist feminism which scorned the vote and concentrated instead on the ‘spiritual’ cause of the ‘freewoman’, who would be bounded by no commitment to conventional political causes or to existing female roles inside or outside the home (11). Fernihough adduces Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as a fictional example of the ‘superman’ envisioned by Orage, and Miriam Henderson in Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs (1915) and Ursula Brangwen in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (also 1915) as fictional embodiments of the ‘freewoman’ ideal. She also shows, however, that fearless hyper-individualism and aloofness from the masses could express themselves in various (and sometimes paradoxical) forms in the early years of the twentieth century, not only in the cultivation of the mind, but also through habits of celibacy, abstemiousness and the regulation of diet and ingestion.