Ruth Livesey. Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-19-726398-3. Price: US$85.00 /£45.00

What holds together the diverse group of figures who populate the pages of Ruth Livesey’s book is, first of all, each other—they were friends, collaborators, lovers, family members, neighbors, and householders. The book is about the individuals who constituted that community and the aesthetic and socialist structures of feeling that held them together. Although “the peculiarly aesthetic genealogy of British socialism” (19) which Livesey traces goes back to the Romantics, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century British writers were far more systematic in their pursuit of reform—forming societies, publishing journals, giving lectures, and leading trade unions. The book is valuable in establishing a clear link between literature and politics and demonstrating the broad range of literature’s engagements with social movements. Sex is the uneasy third term—in the title and the book. Neither Livesey’s history nor the aesthetic-socialists can do without it. It shadows all the reformers’ efforts, and if not attended to, threatens to undo them. Sex might also be the obscure origin of aesthetic socialism. When William Morris takes up his familiar place at the head of the movement, he is driven, Livesey argues, by “a late romantic anxiety concerning the masculinity of the artist and poet in the age of industry” (26). Morris exits the dream world of his early poetry by turning to Iceland, craft, and Karl Marx; but as Livesey puts it, his aesthetic interests are driving the social critique that emerges in the 1880s. Much of the story here is familiar, but Livesey frames it in a new way. Identifying Morris’s shift from consumption to production, Livesey notes a concomitant gender shift from effeminacy to manliness. (Such masculinism encountered resistantance as subsequent readings of Olive Schreiner’s and Dollie Radford’s feminine gendering of creativity show). Morris’s realigned artistic values enabled him to evade the dreaded solipsism of lyric poetry while gaining a “somatic aesthetic theory” that “locates aesthetics in the realm of the body via the pleasures of labour” (34-35). By putting Morris into dialogue with Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891), Livesey shows has Morris’s “distinct socialist aesthetic” evolved “in creative tension” with other kinds of aestheticism (1). While scholars such as Regenia Gagnier have joined Morris and Wilde in common cause, Livesey puts them asunder by insisting that the foregrounding of the somatic put Morris into conflict with Paterian aesthetics. For Paterian writers like Wilde, the value of art lies in its construction of the self. Whereas Morris’s rhetoric and practice lead toward the making of men (and sometimes women), Wilde’s lead toward the formation of personality. Livesey’s second chapter focuses on women closely associated with the socialist movement at its height in London in the 1880s. She effectively recreates the atmosphere of hope, reconstructing friendships and political alliances through diaries, letters, and essays. She also gives the age and the movement its own genre—romance. According to Livesey, activists like Isabella Ford and Clementina Black chose this genre because “Romance was the narrative of hope” as well as a form that would “educate” desire (71-2). Livesey’s readings of these forgotten fictions are persuasive. Romance shows us the world as we want it to be, which leads to dissatisfaction with the one we are in. Dissatisfaction, as Morris knew, can be transformative. Female socialists challenged the male-dominated labor movement, forcing men to see them as fellow workers for social change. In the popular imagination, women were enmeshed with the consumerist excesses of capitalism. Even Vernon Lee renders her female colleagues as picturesque objects in the socialist scene, regarding them as consumers of a lifestyle, not actors in a historical …