“The Workers Must Strive if the Butterflies Must Live”: Ethel Mannin’s Love’s Winnowing , the Socialist Romance Novel, and British Working-Class Women

ABSTRACT: With rare exceptions, studies on author and activist Ethel Mannin have focused on her political non-fiction despite a broad consensus that many of her novels and short stories were vehicles for Socialist ideology. Her novelette “Love’s Winnowing” is a seminal example of how Socialist authors, and Mannin in particular, subverted the romance to political ends. Blurring the line between cultural commentary and popular fiction, Mannin’s nuanced integration of the experiences of working-class women in the story provides a window into the lives and concerns of its target audience, the connection between literature and its socio-political context, and the dialectic between aesthetics and class politics in interwar Britain. If Mannin’s fiction is detached from her politics, scholarship on it will remain incomplete. The same can be said for work that focuses on her politics, neglecting her fiction. Drawing on the popularity of the romance and the political affordances of a genre that occupied a controversial place in working-class communities, Mannin spoke to an intimately gendered politics located firmly within working-class women’s experience, not by overtly stating her aims, but by inviting a group of socially situated readers to draw on their familiarity with cultural codes to interpret her narrative creatively.