Shelagh Delaney was only nineteen when she wrote A Taste of
Honey, a play that established her as one of the most compelling voices to
emerge from working-class Britain after World War II. Selina Todd's new
biography, *Tastes of Honey*, aims to correctly situate Delaney within cultural
history as a writer whose work predicted, more than a decade in advance, the
themes later central to the Women's Liberation Movement. This effort matters
because Delaney's writing, which critically examines marriage and motherhood as
expected paths for working-class women, remains relevant today. The key
question of this review is not whether Delaney merits recognition beyond
historical stereotypes- she clearly does- but whether Todd's approach
effectively honours her memory or instead imposes present-day political
concerns in her stead.
Todd is a serious and accomplished historian, and this
biography is the product of genuine archival labour. She was given access to
what remains of Delaney's personal papers, held by her daughter, and the book
benefits from this unusually close material. Todd traces Delaney's roots in
Salford's working-class culture with evident care, and she is right to insist
that Delaney's early success was neither accident nor aberration but the
product of a wider, if short-lived, opening for working-class voices in postwar
British theatre and film. Delaney belonged to a generation of writers Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Bill Naughton
among them whose work once formed the backbone of English literature teaching
in the comprehensive schools, before a narrower and more fashionable curriculum
displaced it. That generation deserves better than to be forgotten, and Todd's
book is a genuine contribution to keeping it alive.
The trouble begins with the interpretive frame Todd builds
around her subject. As one reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books observed,
Todd is chiefly concerned with repositioning Delaney as a forerunner of
second-wave, 1970s-style feminism, and the success of a biography built on that
kind of claim depends entirely on how well the evidence from the subject's own
life and work actually bears it out. Delaney was a complicated figure who, by
her own director's account, struggled to produce work at all, let alone work
organised around a coherent political programme. To read her retrospectively as
a proto-feminist icon risks doing to Delaney exactly what Todd accuses earlier
critics of doing: flattening a complex working-class woman into a symbol that
serves someone else's argument.
That argument, it should be said plainly, is not incidental
to the book but central to it, and it has been sharpened by the political
climate in which Todd has been writing. The #MeToo movement, which began in the
United States and has since become a global phenomenon, presents itself as a
vehicle for social progress against sexual harassment and assault. Its actual
methods, however- reliance on anonymous and unsubstantiated denunciation, and a
corrosive disregard for the presumption of innocence mark it as something
closer to a movement of moral panic than one of democratic reform, one whose
effect, intended or not, has been to divert attention from the deeper social
questions of inequality, the assault on working-class living standards, and the
danger of war. This climate, more than anything in Delaney's own writing, gives
Todd's reframing of her subject its present urgency.
Todd's politics are not hidden; she sets them out plainly on
her website, describing herself as a socialist opposed to "dog-eat-dog
capitalism" and a longstanding advocate of free, comprehensive education.
She also identifies as a feminist who distinguishes firmly between sex and gender,
rejects the idea of an innate gendered identity, and is active in the
campaigning group Woman's Place UK. This stance has made her, as the LA
Review of Books piece notes, something of a lightning rod within the
gender-critical wing of feminism, sometimes labelled "Trans Exclusionary
Radical Feminism," itself a direct descendant of 1970s second-wave
politics. Whatever one makes of that particular controversy, the underlying
political current is the same one shaping her portrait of Delaney: a socialism
refracted almost entirely through the lens of gender, rather than class.
At bottom, this is watered-down reformism. Todd's own
account of female emancipation locates the source of women's oppression in the
fact of being treated as biologically different and inferior to men, an
analysis that, however sincerely held, points not towards the unity of working
people but towards the separation of women workers from their male class
brothers, and towards reform of capitalism rather than its overthrow. Yet it is
only through the revolutionary reorganisation of society on a socialist basis
that the material conditions producing women's oppression, poverty, the unequal
burden of unpaid domestic labour, the precariousness of working-class family life
can actually be abolished. As Rosa Luxemburg insisted more than a century ago,
the winning of women's rights was never a task for women alone, but a common
concern of the working class as a whole, men and women together.
Shelagh Delaney's writing endures because it captured, with
unusual honesty for its time, the real texture of working-class life: its
deprivations, its longing, its "taste of honey" glimpsed and denied.
She deserves a biography that does justice to that honesty. Selina Todd has
written a well-researched and often illuminating book, but one that ultimately
tells us as much about the feminist politics of 2019 as it does about the
Salford of the 1950s. Readers who come to Tastes of Honey looking for
Delaney herself would do well to read her plays alongside it, and to draw their
own conclusions about what she actually longed for, and why.
Notes
- See My
Autobiography of Carson McCullers, reviewed by Jenn Shapland, 29 April
2021. 2–4. Simon Lee, "A Progenitor of Second-Wave Feminism: On
Selina Todd's Tastes of Honey," Los Angeles Review of Books.
- David
Walsh, World Socialist Web Site, 19 October 2018.
- Selina
Todd, "Policy and Politics," selinatodd.com.
- Rosa
Luxemburg, "Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle," May 1912.
