Rethinking the Politics of William Morris’s Last Romances

Abstract

In the summer of 1872 William Morris abandoned his attempt to write a novel, claiming in a letter to Louisa Baldwin that it was ‘a specimen of how not to do it’, being ‘nothing but landscape and sentiment’. My article proposes that Morris’s rejection of the novel as an unsuitable mode of expression for his own literary and artistic aspirations was also a rejection of what he perceived to be an essentially bourgeois literary form. Instead, Morris found in the literary romance a far more effective vehicle for conveying both his artistic and political ideals as reflected in his own term for News from Nowhere, a classic literary utopia which Morris nonetheless preferred to call a ‘utopian romance’. This article will argue that Morris’s choice of the romance mode was itself a political act which rejected the hegemony of the novel as the dominant Victorian prose form, whilst demonstrating how, in his very last narratives, Morris adapted the romance to suit his own political ends as a revolutionary socialist.

An extended version of this article will form a chapter in ‘To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss’: William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, edited by Paul Leduc Browne and Michelle Weinroth, to be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2014.