“Catching butterflies”: Marion Milner and stream of consciousness writing
Literature Compass June 1, 2020 Helen Tyson
Marion Milner's 1934 book A Life of One's Own used stream of consciousness writing to disentangle her own wants from those imposed by patriarchal capitalist modernity. Milner explicitly identified her method with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and engaged with modernist contemporaries Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson. By the 1930s, her experiments with free writing became part of an effort to extricate the individual from the rising currents of fascism. The article argues that Milner's writing dramatizes the fragile encounter between personal surrender and sociopolitical history, making a case for creative and critical processes in an age of fascism.