Through astute pen portraits of Wilkinson's mentors, acquaintances, colleagues and opponents, Laura Beers crafts an enjoyable, engaging, well-researched reconstruction of Wilkinson's life. As a fellow biographer of Wilkinson, I feel a certain kinship with Beers, so it is in that spirit that I offer my principal disagreements.
Methodologically, all of Wilkinson's biographers have to compensate for the destruction of her personal papers. Beers uses oral testimony, memoirs, and even obituaries to fill much of the evidentiary void and provide the primary interpretative grounds in Red Ellen. Such evidence, in my view, distorts both Wilkinson's politics and personality. Acquainted through intermediaries interviewed in the 1970s, Beers affects an intimacy with “Ellen” and reads off her politics from her personality. Moreover, the appearance of Wilkinson's nicknames in Beers's narrative epitomizes the reduction of the complex interplay of her private-internal and performed-public selves to the routinely “fiery” heroic “Red Ellen” or “Mighty Atom.”
Representing Wilkinson as a doer, not a talker or theoretician (32, 82), Beers downplays Wilkinson's political writings. Wilkinson's journalism in Labour Leader, New Leader, Clarion, All Power, and Workers' Weekly is not scrutinized in the same depth as the memoirs of the hostile Wright Robinson or the disparaging J. T. Walton Newbold. This unbalanced approach to sources not only serves Wilkinson's ideas poorly but also facilitates her continued assimilation into a conventional Labor mold. Like much of the literature on Wilkinson, Red Ellen privileges her 1929 novel Clash (returned to on eleven occasions) over her political writings in the study of her ideas. This emphasis on fiction strikes me as questionable, even if the novel's semiautobiographical aspects make it irresistible to the biographer. Meanwhile, Wilkinson's most famous political text, The Town That Was Murdered, receives only a passing sentence. Beers describes Why Fascism?, coauthored with Edward Conze, as a “book-length tract” (all 317 pages of it), warranting less than a paragraph; their Why War? is entirely overlooked. This is an opportunity missed, since Why War? explores the aspect of Wilkinson's politics that Beers finds most troubling and difficult to interpret: Wilkinson's “pacifism” and attitude toward (revolutionary) violence. In these and other writings after Hitler's accession to power until 1939–40, Wilkinson formulated a pretty consistent position. Believing the threat of fascism to be very real, she rejected both reformism and the Comintern's line in favor of socialism based on workers' control of production (drawing on her guild socialism) and a “real fight for power” to tackle the state and capitalist ownership of industry.
Only through an inattention to her political writings could Beers say that the Jarrow Crusade (which was not her initiative) and the Hire Purchase Act encapsulated Wilkinson's orientation on “moderate reforms within the existing capitalist framework” (399) during the 1930s. Beers admonishes “Ellen” during the revolutionary phases of her politics, which are “uncharacteristic” (82), “childish,” “ill-conceived” (69), “naïve” (99), and “callous and irresponsible” (102). On Wilkinson's “self-professed Marxism” (36), the discussion becomes opaque and jargon-laden (“Marx's dialectics” [23], “economic superstructure [sic, 35],” “imperial-monopolists” [129]). Like Betty Vernon before her (see Vernon's 1982 Wilkinson biography), Beers dilutes Wilkinson's Marxism. Apparently, she was a Marxist who rapidly abandoned the defense of violent means and believed that revolution could be achieved only through the ballot box (182). Her Marxism amounted to little more than an emphasis upon economic or material factors, though this conclusion is hard to reconcile with either the description of Wilkinson's economics as a mix of Hobson and Keynes (399) or the claim that Marxist economics were responsible for her support for selective grammar schools (447). Beers's disinterest in Wilkinson's Marxism obscures the distinctions within this intellectual tradition. She argues that Wilkinson supported the “Bolshevik [sic] leadership” (146) until the late 1930s, conflating Stalin and his Marxist opponents, among whom (although in semi-concealed form) were Willi Münzenberg and his circle. Wilkinson felt a strong bond to this transnational activist network during the late 1920s and 1930s. It had a fundamental influence upon her political outlook and activism.
Beers tends to reify (at times anachronistic) categories—pacifism, feminism, social justice, reform, “human rights activism.” Thus, both participation in Parliament (notwithstanding Wilkinson's critique of it) and social movements (the latter repeatedly designated by Beers as movements for “reform”) indicate Wilkinson's constitutionalism or ideological commitment to reform. Indeed, in Beers's view, Wilkinson regarded even the Russian Revolution as the “herald of reform” (83). Equally, Beers deduces Wilkinson's pacifism from her association with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and claims that she was a Wilsonian (no evidence offered). While the league's consensus combined liberal internationalism, pacifism, and feminism, Wilkinson did not subscribe to this position. Her most intense involvement with this organization was during the Irish War of Independence, when she supported the Republican cause and publicly defended its use of violence to attain just aims. She understood the league as those suffragists who had rejected the First World War, as she had, and counted on these links in relation to various causes from India to locked-out miners. More generally, she supported anticolonial movements irrespective of their attitude to violence. Indeed, Wilkinson and Conze's Why War? criticized the league for the futility of “educating the imperialists.” Likewise, Beers's repeated use of “social justice” (a phrase that rings of contemporary nongovernmental organization activism or Rawlsian liberalism) overlooks the significance of the rare occasion that Wilkinson herself used the phrase: in a collection of Fabian essays in 1940, the very moment she assimilated into the Labor leadership and Labor's ideological mainstream.
While this biography's strength is its familiarity with British high politics, it becomes less assured elsewhere. Middlesbrough is neither a “single industry” nor a “city.” Jarrow is not a port. The Flint sit-down was at Fisher/GM, not Ford. Sarojini Nehru (not Naidu) led the Women's Indian Association. Overall, then, this is a welcome contribution to the debate on this most intriguing and enigmatic of British politicians, one who continues to fascinate and inspire activists today, but it has substantial limitations. Beers succeeds in reconstructing Wilkinson's international activism, but she misses the opportunity to use the transnational approach to revise our understanding, fundamentally accepting an internationalized version of Vernon's interpretation published twenty-five years ago. That revision would have required treating Wilkinson's Labor colleagues who were casting back to their youthful reminiscences of “Red Ellen” with greater skepticism.
