‘Action […] real and effective’: Marion Milner and ‘Expressive Action’

In her 1938 essay, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf exhorted women to turn their backs on the calls to action that resounded across Europe in the 1930s. Rejecting patriotic appeals to support military action, Woolf encouraged women to treat such summons with ‘indifference.’ And yet, this was by no means a form of political inaction. As Jessica Berman has argued, Woolf’s writing stages an attempt to intervene in, disrupt, and reinvent the fascist discourse of political action that had emerged in Britain in the early 1930s. In Marion Milner’s writings from the 1930s, she, like Woolf, stages an intervention in contemporary celebrations of the ‘man of action’, constructing a model of creative life as an alternative form of what she describes as ‘expressive action.’ Tracing the development of Milner’s ‘method’ in the trio of books that arise from Milner’s experiments with creativity in the 1930s and 40s, this essay examines Milner’s distinctive contribution to a modernist tradition of thinking about creativity as a unique form of action. Unpicking Milner’s own scepticism about ‘the man of action’, the essay also explores Milner’s sense of the ‘revolutionary’ power of creativity as a central, albeit frequently imperilled, component of democratic life.